Control Disguised As Coaching

Often, when I talk to managers, they tell me how much time they spend coaching. They tell me stories of meeting, weekly, with their people, doing reviews, pipeline discussions, activity discussions—-all sorts of “coaching meetings.” They say, “Dave, coaching is important and we are spending a lot of time coaching…..”

I often ask, “How’s it working?”

There are sighs and grimaces, “They aren’t paying attention, the aren’t doing what I tell them to do, they don’t seem to care……” The feeling is they are doing the coaching, the problem is with the people.

Usually, following these discussions, I sit in on meetings managers are coaching. Whether a pipeline review, deal review, account review, or activity review, I see the following things:

• They spend their time looking at performance dashboards, talking about the gaps.
• They interrogate people on a deal, focusing more on when it closes, than how we win.
• They look at activity metrics, saying, “You have to do more….”
• They focus on what the seller is doing wrong, not on how they amplify the things they are doing right.
• The talk/listen ratio is at least 80% the manager talking.
• The ask/tell ration is at least 80% the manager telling.
• The meetings end with the manager saying, “You need to do this, this, and that before our next meeting…..”

We’ve all been there. Individual contributors being “coached” by our managers. Managers being “coached” by their managers.

What we are seeing is “Control disguised as coaching!”

And the “victims” of these coaching meetings see these as a total waste of time.

And these coaching managers seldom see what they wanted done, so the intensity of “coaching” escalates.

This is not coaching!

High impact coaching is a collaborative learning conversation. The most effective discussions are where we help our people think about things differently, discover things they may be missing, think about what they need to be doing, developing the plans to move forward to achieve the goals they seek.

These discussions maximize learning, growth, engagement, and ownership of the action plans that result from these discussions. And in the process of conducting these collaborative conversations we learn much more about the individual and how they might grow, and we accomplish our business management objectives.

Coaching is the highest leverage use of our time in developing our people and maximizing performance. But make sure you are coaching and not disguising your efforts to control.

Afterword: Enjoy the fascinating AI discussion of this post!