Coaching brings out inner potential

Peter Jensen, a coach’s coach, describes the person you want in your corner

It only seems appropriate that some of the best answers to what makes a good coach come from a coach himself — or rather, a coach of coaches.

As founder and CEO of Rockwood, Ont.-based Performance Coaching Inc., Peter Jensen knows that good coaches have “tremendous clarity” in giving feedback when helping someone form a picture in her mind of what great performance looks like.

So what does good coaching look like? It’s the passion shown when coaches see people learn.

“When you hit the golf ball better, they’re going, ‘That’s it! That’s coming! Good for you!’ And you know right away they’re in your corner. They’re going to stand by you,” said Jensen, a former sports psychologist who helped groom figure skating Olympians Brian Orser and Elizabeth Manley.

Good coaches, be they a sports coach or an executive coach, have what Jensen calls a “developmental bias,” a genuine desire to help people learn.

“They’re not the kind of people who say to you, ‘We’ll get to that later.’ Instead, it’s ‘You want to learn more about that? Here’s a great book you could read.’ The good coaches can’t help themselves. They always want to help people get better,” he said.

Good coaches ask a lot of questions. They’ll sometimes go into a teaching mode, a mentoring mode or a confronting mode but, 80 per cent of the time, they’re in a consulting mode.

“They’re asking questions, they’re listening, they’re probing, they’re getting you to clarify,” said Jensen. “And that’s true in sports as well. If you look at good figure skating coaches, they’re always asking questions. ‘What was that like?’ ‘How did that feel?’ ‘When you were going in, what did you notice?’ Because they’re not out there doing it, they’re only going to find out by asking questions.”

Good coaches see the potential in a person that the person can’t see herself. And they’ll try to help that person see what she can achieve.

“Imagery is the language of performance. Good coaches get that. They get the fact that people can’t do things they can’t imagine. And more people are blocked by what they imagine than by something else. That’s why people will say to you, ‘I can’t see myself doing that.’”

Even among good coaches, not everyone will make a good coach for a particular individual or a particular situation. Personal rapport is key, as is the ability to inspire confidence and respect from the individual being coached.

Part of that ability to generate respect is the coach’s understanding of the complexities of the person’s position, Jensen noted. A senior manager at a bank once asked him to recommend someone to bounce ideas off of, and Jensen referred him to Don Woodley, former president of Oracle Corporation of Canada and of Compaq Canada.

“(The bank manager) loved it. It was perfect. It was someone who had dealt with the board, a senior guy, and he had the level of experience that person needed. If I had gone in, I could never have possibly coached this person the way Don coached him. Because you need some contextual knowledge of the industry, you need to understand the complexity. If it’s, ‘Why don’t you just do this?’ then you’re showing a level of naivety.”

To make a good match, the person selecting the coach has to understand what the problems are. Before selecting a coach, the HR professional should do an assessment of the leader to be coached, he said.

Just as not everyone’s a coach, likewise, not everyone should be coached, Jensen said. The heart of a problem may be a poor relationship between an individual and his manager. It may also be an unwillingness of an organization to address performance issues.

And even when it comes down to a certain characteristic blocking an individual in her path, it might just be something that coaching can’t fix.

Jensen has a “three Ps” litmus test to indicate whether someone should not be coached: if the behaviour is permanent (the person has been that way for as long as one has known her); if the behaviour is personal (it’s part of who the person is); and if it’s pervasive (the behaviour is seen in all aspects of the person’s life).

“You’re probably not going to change that person through coaching. This person is bringing a life issue to the workplace and they don’t need coaching. They need therapy. That’s why we have employee assistance programs,” he said.

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