Have you got your coaching basics right?

There are many parts of the Ramayana that I like, though my favourite is the part in which Rama gives advice to Bharatha about how the latter should go back and rule on his behalf.

He then goes on to list the qualities of a good king. Much of it, if not all of it, is just as relevant for leaders today; but, this article is not about that but the process Rama adopted.

Coaching, training, mentoring, teaching and facilitating are all nice words that are interchangeably used too often. Sometimes, I have found the coach knows the difference, but not the person being coached.

Such a situation of expectation mismatch, that seems like a topic that English teachers would like to discuss over tea and biscuits, actually causes harm to the relationship and the organisation's productivity.

Coaching in the classical sense is focussed on the person being coached to improve on a specific set of tasks, where the improvement can be clearly measured. The focus is, therefore, on the task.

In mentoring, the focus is on the individual. Training, teaching and facilitation, therefore, become various tools of coaching.

There are many determinants to successful coaching. Some of them are:

Who is doing it to whom?

It's easy to say, “so long as the content is fine, the communicator is not important”. In coaching, the personality and abilities of the coach are very important. The coach must realise the focus is not to prove his or her own expertise or knowledge, but to get the job done.

In many coaching relationships, the coach, on the pretext of “showing how it's done” actually does the task and leaves no room for the person to learn. The coach should also do what it takes to inspire trust, and should be clear about when coaching needs to be substituted by mentoring or even counselling, where the focus is on the emotions of the person.

What is the focus?

As we said earlier, the focus is on completing the task with improved results. Research evidence suggests that adults tend to learn best when they are put through an experience. It could be a larger team, greater revenue responsibility, a new geography or maybe more well-defined stretch goals.

Whatever they are, the coach and the person coached have to be very clear about what the goal is and how the success of the intervention is going to be clearly measured — the “before” and “after” picture must be obvious.

How is it being done?

In most cases, great concepts that are implemented poorly are considered failures. Coaching is no exception. There are many steps and different approaches to coaching. Gaining trust and being seen as a credible authority is the first part. Having a clear understanding of where the person is today and what the end-state should be is the next step. The use of multiple techniques (some possibly the coach is not expert in) is the third. Many of the most effective coaches tend to strike a fine balance between asking the right question and sharing their own /other relevant experiences.

Coaching can be a perfect way of getting a person to perform better. But, if it has ambiguous success criteria and the coach or the person coached do not work well, it can go the other way as well.

Fortunately, there is no dearth of material on coaching, some of it research-based and a lot of it anecdotal. The above could be a starter for the coach and the person coached to define the journey for themselves, based on their own needs — that will have a greater likelihood of success!

(Pradeep Chakravarthy works with the Infosys Leadership Institute. The views represented here are not necessarily those of his employer. He can be contacted at >pradeep_chakravarthy@infosys.com )

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