Introduction

Coaching is a hot topic in business. A whole industry is emerging, with ‘coaching’ having a spectrum of meanings dependant on the sector, the professional discipline, and the seniority of the ‘coachee’.

But what is coaching? Isn’t it the same as training? Or mentoring? Or is it a bit like counselling?

Let us be clear on this:

Training is a structured, inductive process, sometimes led by a physical trainer, or by other third party instruction (e-learning, online tutorials, hard-copy manuals), and is designed to transfer knowledge, and sometimes skills, to help employees perform specific job tasks. Training helps people learn new skills or new knowledge. Training almost always includes a degree of telling on the part of the trainer. Equally, training will sometimes manifest itself in the form of stochastic, trial-and-error experiential learning, where POFO is the norm – Push Off and Find Out. We’ve all experienced that.

Mentoring provides a ‘mentee’ with guidance and advice from someone who has experience in a given field, or who has sufficient credibility for the mentee to consider him, or her, worthy of consultation. The mentor may or may not be a line manager. Often mentoring works best when the mentor is an experienced colleague at the same level of seniority, or a more senior colleague who works in a different team, away from the day-today environment of the mentee. The mentee is offered advice, or a potential solution or a set of potential solutions, by the mentor.

The merchant navy has a culturally accepted practice of providing a ‘Sea Daddy’ for new boy sailors. I know because I had a most wonderful Sea Daddy in 1978, when I was a young teenaged apprentice on a deep-sea merchant vessel. I was struggling with being at sea, on the other side of the world, away from my friends and family, and months away from being able to come home. Without my Sea Daddy, Laird, I would have had difficulty coping. He built my confidence, made me feel good, and challenged me to do ‘even better’. Many people at work find themselves in need of a Sea Daddy from time to time.

Counselling focuses on personal matters. Counselling is used in therapy. We are not at work to counsel people on issues in their personal lives. That is a job for therapeutic professionals. Managers have a responsibility to recognise when they are at the boundaries of their work roles, and when professional counselling would be helpful for an employee.

Signposting to helpful agencies makes sense – but in my experience of management development, too many managers get into territory that is outside their areas of competence. Delusional beliefs exist that being a boss in some way qualifies you to offer therapeutic interventions. The phenomenal volume of psycho-babble in many of today’s management development programmes is, I believe, a worrying trend. There are too many managers (and management development trainers) in business who have convinced themselves that they can ‘help’ employees in areas way beyond their understanding and capabilities. As the saying goes, “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Managers who have recently trained as NLP practitioners take note. Recently trained ‘life coaches’ take extra note.

Coaching, by contrast, is a process designed to help people identify their own chosen path in relation to a work skill or discipline. It is about asking. When work-based coaching is consistently done well, and has become a part of the culture of an organisation, it encourages self-learning, invites creativity and delivers higher performance. It becomes OK for people to ‘admit’ to work areas in which they need personal development, new skills, or new ways of doing things – when otherwise they might have hidden their uncertainty, or covered up their inadequacies.

When coaching is fully integrated into an organisation, it builds confidence and generates ‘response-ability’ in individuals; that is, the ability to respond – to take action to improve their ability to perform at work. Ownership by the coachee and self-determination are key facets of effective coaching.

Coaching is about helping people who already have ability and knowledge to further improve their performance – to become even better. Primarily it is a process used to stimulate behaviour changes, although changes to thinking patterns are usually an essential precursor to behavioural shifts. Often, the coachee has the answer right in front of him or her. The job of the coach is to help the coachee self-discover a way forward.

Coaching Variants

In Britain alone there are numerous organisations professing to be the authority on business coaching, but not a single institute or body exists that can profess to be the acknowledged lead body. A number of self-accredited organisations offer their own versions of certificates or diplomas in coaching. A small number of National Vocational Qualifications are now evolving in the UK that provide the first evidence of a structured approach to work-based coaching. The robustness of the academic content of these programmes varies significantly, with a key variant being the degree to which the impact of language is considered and understood.

The marketplace is crammed full of supposed coaching experts, some of whom have questionable credibility in terms of their competence to deal with the psychological factors involved in helping people to change their thinking and behaviour at work, which, make no mistake, is exactly what coaching is about.

Virtually anyone can describe himself or herself as a ‘coach’. The very nature of people is that emotional well-being at work becomes interwoven with domestic life. This creates the potential for poorly trained individuals to operate beyond the boundaries of work-based coaching and, perhaps inadvertently, dabble in psychological matters for which they are ill equipped to operate.

Coaches inevitably touch people’s psyches, and this requires a degree of coaching skill that some ‘weekend courses’ are unlikely to provide. I have witnessed some dreadful examples of managers (and management developers) causing psychological damage to otherwise well-balanced and productive individuals. On too many occasions, clients of mine have described circumstances that can only be described as ham-fisted attempts by a coach to offer ‘therapy’. The ego of the coach seems to get in the way of the ego strengthening of the coachee. Bulls in china shops.

My guidance to you is to be wary of all alleged ‘coaches’, especially ‘life coaches’. What qualifies someone to be a coach? Within what parameters?

Coaching as a professional activity requires moderation by an independent professional body or academic institute. Governance is required.

It is with these stark warnings in mind that I commend the Continue & Begin coaching model. The approach is light in terms of psychological impact. In fact, the model proposes ego strengthening as the starting point for change work, with minimal attention given to ‘areas for improvement’, at least until the coachee has celebrated his or her successes in a given area of operation.

The model is simple in structure, easy to use, and low risk. It requires nothing in the way of ‘personal analysis’. It is therefore safe to use, even in the clumsiest of hands.

At a business level, one of the key benefits of Continue & Begin is the speed of application and efficiency of time involvement for both coach and coachee. In retail environments it is essential that any coaching model be quick to use and easy to share with colleagues. Continue & Begin was developed with simplicity in mind. That’s why, in just a few years since its inception, so many of today’s global brands are now using Continue & Begin to help their people to continue to do some things well and to begin to do other things differently – maybe even better than they already do.