More Courses From The Bank: What Coaching Isn't

I did the two-day course on coaching that's part of The Bank's Leadership course recently. Coaching is about having someone else monitor your technique, spot where it could be improved and work with you to improve it. Part of that is helping you maintain the state of mind you need to be in to perform well, but coaching isn't therapy. Nor is it training, which is either about learning skills and knowledge that you don't have or practicing certain moves so that they become second nature. Coaching is about improving what you're already doing pretty well. Or not, if you attended the course. Which was based on the techniques used by soi-disant life coaches, and especially the GROW acronym: clarifying Goals, what the Reality of the situation is, looking at the Options you have and then working out what you Will do to get started. This isn't coaching. It's planning.

The closest we came to getting specific instructions about doing anything was through a role-play. My actress was a middle-aged lady regulatory risk wonk with little confidence and less presence (good acting) who needed some more money and was thinking about promotion to grades where knowledge is nothing and confident bullshit is everything. In the real world, I would never have accepted her request to use my newly-acquired coaching skills, and even if I did, I would have done exactly what I did in the role-play, which was shut the relationship down politely once I realised what kind of person she was. I can't have people like that in my life. I was supposed to have asked questions (I did, just ones that were rather too much to the point) and done a lot of supportive reflective listening. In the second, my colleague had a boisterous but effective team leader who was going to take a step up to working with senior managers and he was slightly concerned that she might make the wrong impression on the upper muckamucks. What he was supposed to have done was ask questions that invited her to reflect on her behaviour: "how do you think senior management might interpret you being late to meetings?" That sort of thing.

Discussing the role-play afterwards, I explained that if anyone but especially my line manager started using those "how do you think" questions on me, I would assume it was Quiz Time and I was being set up. That is not, I said, how you talk to adults, but to children, and the kids don't like it much either. I would have simply checked with my boisterous project manager something like this: "that bit where you're late for meetings? You know you can't do that with senior management, right?" Which I could do in real life because both my project manager and I would know what I was referring to. And which would constitute coaching as ordinarily understood - a quick, on-the-fly technical check.

But not as understood by people who do Life Coaching to supplement their incomes as freelance external trainers. Uh-huh. They need to use the GROW (or any other) acronym because it provides a repeatable structure to their life coaching sessions, which are with people with whom they don't have a history nor a common work culture and can't have the shorthand conversations that you can bet Roger Federer had with Severin Luthi.

Does it matter? Yes. Coaching is one thing and it should not be confused with advising, or training or planning, or helping, or rescuing, or bailing-out-of-the-shit, or discussing-a-problem, or giving a one-to-one, or therapy or appraising or any of those other things it got confused with during the two days. Each one takes place in different circumstances, with different relationships and uses different techniques to achieve different aims. Lumping them all together and calling it "coaching" is just sloppy. It misses the chance to get some serious, specific, useful content over.

Did I take anything away from the course that was useful? Not really. It's aimed at the very people who won't do it: the manipulative managers for whom "performance management" is what you do when you need to get rid of people, and "coaching" is what you do when you've told someone that what they've been doing is wrong and you're very disappointed in them.

Every one of the trainers so far has mentioned Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm sure I skimmed it in a bookshop once and put it back because it was too new-age for me. I'm starting to think I need to read it, not because it might tell me something, but because it's the Enemy's Bible.