by Charles E Smith, PhD

“Coachability” is the willingness to be coached, to listen, to respect instruction and act on it.   Coaching — another set of eyes — lets you see what’s missing, which, if you act on it, could make a big difference.

These days, a lot of people know that coaching is a good idea.  They listen to it politely but never do anything differently.  Such pretending to listen is seductive.  Last night I sat with an engineer for almost three hours.  He had suffered for years with his boss’s unwillingness to listen to him.  He shared his insights, hopes, fears, sense of hopelessness, and wishes for a career full of accomplishment and supportive relationships.  I helped him analyze the situation, explore strategies and behaviors, get in touch with his own responsibility for the lack of communication, and actions that would move the situation forward.  Finally, I asked him if he would act on any of what was discussed and he said, “No, I’m not ready.”

It’s said that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.  It’s like that with coaching.  To be uncoachable means that you won’t really listen and follow instructions, or are afraid to try.  You may think you already know, or hear advice as domination, or feel hopeless.  Maybe you won’t be vulnerable, or that you simply accept your current performance, even when you know it is weak.

Before he died, I attended a conference led by W. Edwards Deming, the Quality expert who helped Japan transform its manufacturing practices and capture huge segments of the global auto and technology markets.  He told us that in the West we traced problems to there being something wrong with the people doing the job.  Our solutions typically were to move or change people, or to restructure.

In contrast, he said, the Japanese leaders considered their quality and production problems a matter of training and that their job was to discover or invent the training that would result in resolution and progress.

Every team that wins championships is well-coached.  An uncoached team flirts with extinction.  Welcome to the world as we know it.  Instead of a symphony — the sound of high human purpose, elegance, and flawlessly coordinated action, we have a cacophony of egos without shared meaning, creating disorder by degrees, all the while falsely expecting order.

Imagine how the LA Lakers would do if many players were uncoachable.

Imagine how the Congress, or your boss might do, if they were properly coached.

I could list all the places I know that are less effective than they could be if they were coached, but I won’t.  Make your own list.  We home schooled our boys for several years, and a major success was that they became coachable learners, not afraid of the future nor of being wrong.

But most of my friends and people I know are uncoachable.   I’ve come to think that most of the world’s problems come from lack of proper training — in how to get along, how to cooperate, how to create performance aspirations beyond normal, how to become responsible for an entire business & not just someone’s small part of it.  These are all training problems and most people are untrained.

To be coachable is a choice.  Anybody can do it.  It’s simple, but not easy.  You just have to give up your ego for a while.

Imagine a coachable company, a coachable family, a coachable marriage, a coachable political system, a coachable world.

Can we, as coaches and leaders, help our clients to be more coachable?  Can we become more coachable ourselves? Comment below!

Let’s weigh in on a great coaching agenda debate…whose agenda is it anyway?  Below is the write-up from the Coaching-At-Work e-newsletter out of the UK, which does a great job of introducing the issue.  What are your thoughts?  Make sure you are logged in to be able to have a comment box to reply.

“Should we as coaches be leveraging our coaching assignments to save the world?

Should we be holding our clients accountable for their actions in terms of how they impact their team, their organisation, the planet, the universe?

Some would argue that there is no greater calling than that (see Sir John Whitmore’s blog at http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2010/01/16/coaches-need-to-says-john-whitmore/ ) while others are adamant that we have no place or right whatsoever other than to serve the agenda of the client paying the bill. I sat in on a fascinating and lively debate a few weeks back at the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC) UK’s annual conference. The issue of whose and which agenda we should attend to in coaching caused quite a stir. The panel consisted of the School of Coaching’s Myles Downey, Sheffield Hallam University’s David Megginson and John Blakey, co-author of Where were all the coaches when the banks went down? For Blakey, it was about having the “bravery to confront” and putting “the system’s interests above the individual’s”. Myles Downey, on the other hand, said “I think this is really dangerous. Who the X do we think we are? We’re not here to save the banking system, to save the planet, to bring humanity into the workplace. We’re not contracted to do that” (for a full write-up of the debate and the rest of the EMCC conference, see the July/August issue). ” ~Liz Hall, editor of http://www.coaching-at-work.com/

Are you in the Sir John Whitmore camp or the Myles Downey camp, or somewhere in between?

Leading Coaches Sheila Maher and Suzi Pomerantz have been brainstorming about what advice we’d give to those executives in organizations who have the job of hiring executive coaches.  We’ve put together a rating scale and we’d love your feedback and input, from your own experience, about the hiring of “individual coaches of excellence”, whether they are solopreneur coaches or chosen from among a cadre of coaches in a coaching company.

We assert that it is not useful to shop by price.  The cheapest coach is not the best coach.  Shopping for coaches on price, comparing rates per coach, is not how to choose excellence.  It is impossible to compare the hourly rate per coach in a coaching company with the hourly rate per coach as an individual solopreneur due to cost factors such as overhead, marketing, and mark-ups for profit margin in a coaching company.  In other words, the organization may hire a $400 an hour coach from a coaching company, but may actually be getting the services of a coach who is only being paid $80 an hour by the coaching company that subcontracted them out.

Thus, we offer this template for hiring executive coaches of excellence so that you will have criteria to use besides pricing:  the hiring executive can use this for interviews or in an RFP process for executive coaches.

Criteria for selecting coaches

While designing this list, we allocated points for each item, thinking that the hiring executive would then be able to determine based on weighted criteria whether or not the coach being interviewed is a coach of excellence.

Executive Experience:  total points: 30

1. Do they have management, leadership, or boardroom experience?  — 10 points
2. Experience at the executive level: Have they coached executives or worked as an executive? — 20 points

Coach Experience:  total points: 50

1. What led you to become a coach? — 0 points (this is just about hearing their story to determine if their journey is relevant to your coaching needs)
2. What was the most valuable “take away” from your coach training?  –  5 points
3. How much of your coaching has been done in organizations? – 10  points if over  70%, 0 points if below 50%
4. How do you integrate your coaching into organizational systems?  –5 points
5. Have they had experience coaching executives at the same level for which you’re hiring?  (i.e., have they coached CxO’s or high potential leaders before?) – 10 points
6. Do you have any “specialty” areas that you like to coach or have significant background in, i.e. diversity, conflict, leadership presence?  — 1 point
7. What results do your clients report from their work with you?—10  points if their executive client references confirm these results OR if the results they report are aligned with what you are looking to hire them to do.
8. What is the coach’s philosophy?  Does it align with the organization’s mission, objectives, values and culture? – 5 points
9. Do they have a coaching credential from ICF or IAC?  — 4 points

Using Coaching Tools Effectively:  total points: 20

1. How have you measured the success of your coaching? Has the coach successfully used metrics to measure results and demonstrate behavioral change? — 4 points
2. Has the coach had experience using the organization’s metrics to measure the results of the coaching program?  360’s, employee satisfaction, leadership survey, already existing tools in the org. — 4 points
3. What assessments has the coach used? How has the coach used assessments within the coaching engagement? — 4 points
4. What leadership model(s) and organizational theories has the coach utilized and how have they used it in their coaching? –  4 points
5. What coaching methodology has the coach utilized and why is it appropriate for this executive, this organization, this engagement? — 4 points

Do you agree with these criteria?  What are we missing?  Are these weights aligned with your thinking about what’s important to consider?

Be sure you are logged in so you can comment below!

My colleague and friend, Jeremy Nash, wrote a powerful paper on the first-hand reactions of those who have survived workplace cut-backs in light of the recent economic influences. Jeremy  has been researching workplace survivors, interviewed them, and wrote the attached paper.

I think it’s an important contribution to the articles I’ve seen out there.

As a reader, you get to see actual comments made by survivors who are facing a host of challenges that are highly deserving of immediate attention.

Jeremy works with organizations looking to create a brighter, more positive future with their people, restore morale, and boost productivity. It’s hard for people to be inspired when they’re so overworked and little in the way of acknowledgment or investment is coming their way.  Jeremy gave me permission to share this with you, and feel free to comment below!

“The workforce has been sliced into over the past twelve to eighteen months wtih shocking speed and depth.  Though the pace has slowed, at its peak, several hundred thousand people per month were losing their jobs.  This has placed a significant strain on those who have kept their jobs and the reverberations are still being felt.  The reader will hear this directly from the mouths of workplace survivors themeslves in the pages that follow.

Survivors speak about how crisis communications were handled, and the fear, confusion and distrust that remain. They share about dealing with the loss of co-workers, and the challenges of managing their workload, accepting changes to the performance appraisal system and their views regarding compensation.  The interviews reveal numerous stress points inside many an organization deserving of senior management attention.  [To read the full pdf click below to download:]

Workplace Survivors