What is coaching?
It is a one-on-one development process formally contracted between a coach and a management-level client to help achieve goals related to professional development and/or business performance. Coaching typically focuses on helping the client become more self-aware through the use of action learning methods. Organizations tend to make the investment in the resources required for coaching for executives who are highly valued and who are viewed as having a future potential. Typical coaching programs involve regular weekly or bi-weekly coaching sessions with a coach for a period of six months to a year or more.

When is Coaching Appropriate?
There are lots of ways to learn. Our early educational lives were typically dominated by “instruction” in one form or another. As we grew into adulthood, trial and error becomes perhaps the most common learning method. We also learn by reading about what others have done, watching what others do, or occasionally by going to formal classes. Personal coaching is also a learning alternative, especially when an executive faces a change in the nature or scope of work, or a new assignment with a high level of complexity and ambiguity.

Coaching tends to be most appropriate when:

* Performance makes an important difference to the employer. Almost by definition, the contributions expected of senior executives fall into this category. Managers at other levels who are in especially significant roles also are responsible for making an important contribution, so they too can be appropriate coaching clients.
* The relevant learning issues are in the “soft skills” area. These skills include the ability to build relationships with others and to work in teams.
* There are no right answers. You need to develop your own solutions to certain of the puzzles of executive life, and it’s hard to do it on your own. If there were right answers hidden away somewhere, the task would be a lot easier.
* The learning needs to happen according to your schedule, and quickly. People who are moved into important positions with little advance notice can be supported with a coach.

How does a coach help?

What actually happens in the coaching relationship that allows you to get better at interpersonal skills, communicating, delegating, time management, emotional self-management, or other soft skills? How does someone focus on and improve these kinds of skills?

First, let’s agree that these skills are not of the kind that can be learned in a classroom setting. Rather, they are learned by direct interaction with others while working. Sometimes this is called “action learning.” This is the way adults learn best, and this is the model that best applies to interpersonal skills. With the coach’s help, a feedback loop is created based on trying out new behaviors, followed by feedback and reflection, and then trying again to be as effective at whatever is happening.

What the coach and the coaching process contribute to the learning:

1. Self-discipline. Because of the regularity of appointments and the involvement of other people, it’s a lot easier to stay on track. Organizational life is full of distractions, even emergencies. Having a coach is a way to increase the priority on this change effort.
2. Valid data. Change and learning require good data, and the coach can help bring that about. Information is needed on what you bring to the job, what actions are being effective, what is needed in order to succeed. A coach may offer his or her personal views of your actions and/or may do some “testing” using standardized inventories. The coach can interview others in the organization to get their views confidentially. The coach can help interpret 360º surveys, attitude surveys, or performance reviews. Perhaps most importantly, the coach can help you make sense of all this data.
3. New ideas. The coach may or may not have ever held a job such as yours. But he or she has talked to a lot of people like you, and knows something about how they have succeeded. The coach brings new perspective to your thinking, helps you get out of mental ruts and dead ends. Not all the ideas are brilliant, or will work for you. Nonetheless, there’s a pool of suggestions waiting for you to check out.
4. Support. It’s not easy to do things differently. Making changes means taking risks, persevering in the face of resistance, and possibly feeling a little strange or silly at times. Changes require a “safe” environment in which to takes these risks. The coach is there to provide encouragement, help, and someone to talk to while all this is happening.
5. The learning process. Sometimes the greatest value coming out of a coaching relationship isn’t just your changed behavior or the changed perceptions of others in the organization. Sometimes it is the client’s insight into how to learn. The coach’s expertise is exactly in this domain, and some of it should rub off on you over the course of your relationship.

A coaching assignment is triggered by an opportunity or a glitch or a transition of one kind or another. There will be many more opportunities, glitches, and transitions in life, but a coach won’t be there for most of them. If the client takes away good insights into how to handle the learning/change process, and a sense as to how to use these insights in future situations, then he or she is a real winner.