Good Bosses Make Bad Coaches

---

Apr 12, 2007 - OI Partners

You know your employees’ strengths and weaknesses, their deadlines, their projects, their targets and their overall scope of work. You know where they need to network more, network less, how they should handle an upcoming meeting or new client or their own employees. And yes, some of you reading this may even know about their personal lives. You might have good communication and a great relationship with your employees.

These things might make you a good boss, maybe even a great boss. But the skill set of a good boss and the skill set of a good coach are quite different. Seldom can one person possess them all. This is exactly the reason why professional coaching has grown in popularity in recent years. A professional coach is typically more effective in developing an employee than a “good boss.”

Coaching is essentially about attitude and behavior change or refinement. This requires a great deal of training and finesse on the part of the coach such that a relationship is built between the coach and the employee—a relationship built on trust. Trust enables the employee to bring to the table, to the coaching relationship, uncensored dialogue.

The degree of attitude and behavioral change desired to achieve and sustain results can only effectively be achieved through the use of a professional coach. In fact, HR Monthly reports that “recent studies show business coaching and executive coaching to be the most effective means for achieving sustainable growth, change and development in the individual, group and organization.” Why? Professional coaches bring with them training, resources and a commitment to this work that a good boss does not have time or may not have the ability to focus on for a sustained period of time.

I’ve chosen two examples to highlight why good bosses make bad coaches. Put more positively (as a coach would), these examples highlight why a professional coach can guide employees to achieve the professional and personal development they need in today’s business world.

Reason #1 – Professional Coaches Have the Right Kind of Influence.

Is there a “wrong” type of influence? Yes, in a coaching relationship where the goal is long-term sustainable change in attitude and behavior, there is a wrong type of influence.

The wrong type of influence yields only short-term outcomes. Professional coaches, through their relationship with the coachee, uses an influence that is much more about respect, integrity, credibility and trustworthiness and less about authority, rewards and punishments. The latter is where most managers derive their influence. Because of time constraints, mangers fall back on or resort to the influence invested in them by their authority or position. When it is imperative that your business thrive and your people achieve, in a coaching relationship, this type of positional power lessens the results, weakens the commitment and does little to build trust in a relationship (coaching) where success is fundamentally linked to trust.

At the heart of a coaching relationship is a trust that exists that says to the coachee, you are not being judged, you can bring your good, your bad and your ugly to the table for us to discuss and you can know that all of this will in no way be held against you in a future performance review, in assigning future visible projects, in how your abilities are viewed going forward, etc.

What this does for the coachee are a couple of things. First, it allows him to freely, without penalty, examine his strengths and weaknesses and determine openly what attitude or behavioral changes need addressing. Secondly, it allows him to determine the skills he can use or needs to develop and to elevate his commitment to reach the desired outcome.

Reason #2 – Professional Coaches Maintain a Presence Throughout. A professional coach’s duty in the coaching relationship is to the coachee and guiding the coachee through her own discovery of insights into issues, understanding of attitudes and clarity of how her behaviors affect outcomes. A professional coach accomplishes these goals by being unsaddled, unburdened and unencumbered by the demands of a good manager’s position. Professional coaches are not saddled with the daily distractions that inhibit a manager’s ability to effectively coach. Daily distractions such as the need to multi-task, ringing phones, demands from other employees, a boss or a project or deadline, email, instant messaging, making mental notes or “to do” lists and more. Distractions make an employee feel less respected, less validated and less heard. A professional coach is detached from the day-to-day outcomes of the coachee’s office in a way that facilitates thinking about situations and challenges that creates new possibilities.

To achieve sustainable results through coaching, the coachee must have the benefit of the coach’s undivided attention, free from bias and steep in objectivity. By its very nature, the vast majority of boss/employee relationships are void of bias or objectivity and being able to multi-task is likely one of the reasons you became the boss in the first place.

If your goal is to deepen relationships with your most valued employees while also increasing their effectiveness, bringing them into alignment with organizational aims and nourish their growth for the economic benefit of the your company, then professional coaching is the way to maximize the likelihood of these results. Good bosses can be good at coaching through an immediate need (i.e., how best to move a stalled project).

Professional coaches are excellent at producing behavioral change and growth in employees for the longer terms benefit of the employee and the company. Professional coaches possess the training, the discipline, the resources and the passion to provide the critical help needed for both the coachee and the company.

Lynn Watts is a consultant and executive coach with OI Partners Cincinnati (www.oipartners.net). Lynn has more than 20 years of sales and sales management experience with IBM and Microsoft Corporation. She manages her own career coaching and leadership development consulting practice, Learn, Lead, Live, Inc. Lynn can be reached at watts@promarkoi.com.