What Is Coaching?

It seems the word “Coaching” has become one of those fashionable words, permeating every discussion. Go back 15 or more years, and we barely saw the word coaching. Today, we find coaching applying to about everything we do, both in business and in our personal lives.

We see Executive Coaching, Career Coaching, Life Coaching, Performance Coaching, Business Coaching, Health/Wellness Coaching, Agile/Team Coaching, Sales Coaching, Spiritual Coaching, Dietary Coaching, and on an on and on. Endless “influencers” in social media claim to be providing coaching, where all they are really doing is broadcasting. There is the concept of coaching for virtually every aspect of our business and personal lives.

And with the popularity of this term, there are endless tools that claim to provide coaching. My apple watch provides me “coaching” for a variety of health/fitness things. It provides coaching on how I spend my time. And more.

In selling, there is no end to the tools that claim to provide coaching, performance reporting tools, conversational intelligence, role play tools, social selling, prospecting/customer engagement, negotiation, objection handling, closing, time management. There is no aspect of what we do as sellers in which there is some tool that claims to coach. And this is exacerbated by all the AI adaptations and LLMs.

As a result, it seems everything is “coaching.”

But coaching, at least in selling and GTM is very focused and specific. And this coaching is not getting done or is being done poorly.

So what is coaching?

Let’s start with what coaching is not:

• Training isn’t coaching. Training focuses on helping us learn new things, but training is focused purely on this skill development through various instructional methods/experiences. Training may have elements of coaching embedded in the programs, but it is not coaching.
• Performance dashboards do not provide coaching, though the majority of vendors claim they do. The dashboards may provide very powerful insights around virtually everything we do. They can provide analysis to help us understand where we are doing well, where we need to improve. But they do not provide coaching.
• We have very rich conversational intelligence tools. They provide very powerful insights into each conversation. What was the talk/listen ratio, how many questions did you ask, how engaged was the other party? They may provide powerful recommendations, “Make sure you ask 4 questions and swear once.” But this isn’t coaching.
• We have role play tools, leveraging AI, that provide very realistic role plays, followed by analysis and recommendations. And this isn’t coaching.
• We can leverage AI tools to provide research, help us plan a meeting, give us the scripts or texts we use to execute the meeting. While these can be powerful, these aren’t coaching.
• We have marketing, CRM, and other tools that prompt us to reach out to a customer, giving us a lot of background about why, giving us recommendations about what we might talk about. This is not coaching.
• We have those meetings scheduled every week, pipeline reviews, deal reviews, account reviews one on ones, and others. Our managers ask about what’s happened, and what we are planning to do in the week. This is not coaching.
• Or our managers get us together to go through their laundry lists of the things we are doing wrong, concluding, “You need to stop doing these things.” Alternatively, telling us what top performers do, and instructing us to do those things. This is not coaching.
• There are the meetings we might have with our management, usually with them sitting behind their screens, looking at a dashboard, and saying, “Your pipeline is weak, you need to get to 3X!” This is not coaching.
• We leverage LLMs for help, support.  Perhaps we ask them for ideas, to research a customer, plan a call/meeting.  And they give us the answers to those questions.  Sometimes they are quite powerful (given good prompt engineering), but this is not coaching.

I’ll stop here. Are you starting to discern a pattern in these things?

Each of them is valuable, and helps sellers and others do their jobs, do more on their jobs, even do their jobs better. I’m not suggesting we stop using these tools. But many claim to provide coaching–and they don’t, and they aren’t designed to provide coaching.

These provide information, knowledge, analysis, insights, and recommendations. They are designed to provide answers. But this is not coaching.

And now we are starting to see a lot of “experts” providing AI based coaching bots. Some are very good! One of the best is Marshall Goldmith’s, a world famous leadership coach. The Marshall Goldsmith bot can answer virtually any question you pose. The answers are based strictly on his writing, lectures, books. But his bot does not provide coaching, at least in the style that Marshall Goldsmith coaches. It provides answers to questions or prompts the user provides.

Hopefully, you are starting to see the commonality of all these things. At best they are designed to give you very high quality answers. They provide a lot of data, a lot of information, and recommendations based on that.

But providing answers is not what coaching is about.

Coaching is not about giving answers, it is about helping each party involved in the coaching conversation learn, grow and develop!  Coaching empowers people to figure things out, developing answers for themselves.

Coaching is a collaborative conversation, where each person is actively engaged in learning and improving their performance. As coaches, we are ineffective when we give people the answers.

• Effective coaching is about helping people discover the answers. It’s about asking questions about something they may be trying to do, helping them learn, encouraging them to consider alternative courses of action, helping them figure out the answers to those questions.
• Effective coaching probes, trying to help the person and the coach discern root causes, understanding both what is happening, why it’s happening.
• Effective coaching is moving beyond helping the person learn about what’s happening and why, it helps the explore what they might do about it. What alternative courses of action might we take, what might we change, how do we become more impactful in those next steps, how do we make sure we are doing the right things, at the right time, with the right people to achieve the right goal.
• Effective coaching involves helping the person evaluate the various options to move forward, then it helps the person identify an commit to the next steps they are going to take.
• Effective coaching requires follow up. Have the people taken the action they committed to? What was their experience? Did they achieve their goals? What are they doing next?
• Effective coaching is an encounter where each person comes away from the exchange having learned something. It’s not just for the coachee, the coach should be learning as much or more than the person being coached. The coach will be learning more about the individual being coached. The coach may identify systemic issues that impact others in the organization, or problems that will impact the organization.
• Effective coaching is a collaborative conversation. (To understand the 18 critical elements of collaborative conversations, just send me an email.)
• Effective coaching is giving and receiving good feedback. (If you want the 11 elements of giving and receiving good feedback, send me an email.)
• Effective coaching empowers others to take ownership and action. 
• Effective coaching builds confidence in the people we are coaching.
• Effective coaching isn’t reserved to our coaching meetings, coaching can occur at any time. A casual conversation waiting for coffee, a quick debrief after a meeting. It can take a minute, five minutes, thirty minutes, whatever is appropriate.
• Effective coaching may identify training needs, but training has a slightly different purpose than coaching.  And every training program requires ongoing coaching to assure it has impact.
• Effective coaching recognizes the differences in communications styles. Each participant should recognize the impact of their own style and that of the person engaged, adapting how we communicate most effectively.
• Effective coaching isn’t limited to the here and now. We want to look at people’s long term development, growth and potential contributions to the organization.
• Effective coaching isn’t limited to one on one conversations, we can engage our teams in collaborative learning session.
• To coach effectively, we must genuinely care about each other’s success.

Coaching, in the sense of business and sales coaching, has one and only one goal. It’s to maximize the performance of the individual in their current role, and to develop them to grow in that role and their contribution to the organization.

Unfortunately, coaching has become one of those high fashion words, where it’s so easy to lose sight of what coaching is. And that’s tragic!

Afterword:  As you reflect on effective coaching, you might recognize in complex B2B buying, the highest impact sellers are, for all intents, coaching the customer through their buying process.  What if we started developing the coaching skills of our sellers, focused on coaching their customers?  (But to do this, managers have to model effective coaching, as well.)

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of the post.  It’s a great discussion, I think they present the key elements of effective coaching more effectively than I did.  On of the observations they have is the ripple effect of high impact coaching on the overall development and improvement of the organization.  This is brilliant!