Can anybody be a coach or do you need special skills or a particular personality?
If it’s just about developing a skill set then surely through quality training, or coaching, these can be developed. On the other hand, if coaches replicate coaching behaviours and perform them automatically without internalising or contextualising their actions isn’t it like being able to produce Chinese characters without knowing what they mean?
The question might be does it matter? You could argue that if a manager acting in a coaching role can learn a coaching skill to improve a performance aspect of an employee and that objective is achieved, it doesn’t matter how deeply s/he feels the experience; the job is done. However, by focussing on set routines and phrases that can be learnt verbatim there is a risk of turning ourselves into automata and not doing the things that humans do much better than machines; namely think contextually, integratively, laterally - even illogically, in order to arrive at some new synergic destination that wasn’t on the planned route.
Coaching should be viewed as being much more than a just set of behaviours but as a philosophical approach and way of being. For coaching to focus on growth rather than rectification, this is the only option.
Now comes the problem; changing attitudes and beliefs is more of a challenge than changing behaviours; it takes longer and is harder to measure. Furthermore, it requires much more of a corporate approach which creates a culture of ‘the way we do things here.’ For a coaching culture to prevail it needs strong support at the highest level which not always be forthcoming.
In any organisation there will be those managers with a natural disposition towards and talent for coaching, those who can learn the skills but won’t really understand what they are doing or why and those who just don’t get it.
What do you do next Coach?
Here's one guy with an idea. Now I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree at this stage - you decide what you think.
