“You don’t know how good you’ve got it!”
I almost said that. I was chatting with a young friend. I wasn’t thinking about how tough it was, walking in my bare feet through the snow to school, uphill both ways. I was thinking about coaching, or rather the lack of it in my day.
My friend was kvetching about the difficulty of working some coaching sessions into her already jam-packed schedule. It’s hard, but gosh, at least coaching was available.
“When I was your age …”
Yep, I thought that, too. When I was her age there really was no coaching as we know it.
If you got coaching back then, it came from a mentor or from a good friend. A lot of that was very helpful, but face it, it wasn’t coaching the way we know it today.
I don’t ever remember filling out any kind of assessment instrument during my corporate period. If you wanted 360 feedback, you had to figure out how to get it yourself. And there was a bigger problem.
“Fast Trackers” like me were not supposed to need help. Asking for it was not a sign that you wanted to get better, it was a message that you weren’t very good, maybe not good enough to get promoted.
If you did decide you wanted coaching, there was no one to call. There were therapists for behavioral issues and consultants for business, but hardly anyone brought those two worlds together.
Today things are decidedly different and better. Coaching is considered a key part of the mix for any talent development program. i4cp recommends coaching as one of “Five Steps to Accelerate High-Potential Employees’ Launch Toward Leadership.” They recommend both professional coaching and coaching by line managers.
On the professional side, there are all kinds of people hanging out their coaching shingle. People like Mary Jo Asmus, an executive coach with real executive experience, choose to seek certification to master coaching skills. And books like Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don’t Get It by Sandra Mashihi and Kenneth Nowack can help professionals and also working managers do a better job of coaching.
The fact is that good coaching can be a great learning accelerator and it’s readily available. That’s one way that things are way better today than when I was coming up.
