In December 2023, I was in London to run another team-building event. The night before I was having dinner with one of the Directors of the company and he asked me a couple of questions that I had never had to consider before: Why do people employ external coaches? And what would I get from the experience if I had a coach?
Although I have done a lot of coaching over the years, it is almost always the case that people approach me, and ask me to coach them, so I’ve never really had to sell the concept. I gave him a meandering response, but the questions really got me thinking about the process of coaching and why one person sitting in a room with another (or in front of a couple of screens) helps with their business life (and beyond).
What & How
As I think about the many people I have worked with over the decades, one thing becomes very clear: I do not need to know very much about the “content” that I am helping with (although sometimes I do). This is because, predominantly, we are working on how the other person thinks, feels and acts, and not what they are thinking, feeling and doing.
Prioritising & Patterns
A good example of this was a senior manager who was very passionate about his role and his job, but who had great difficulties in prioritising; he seemed able only to concentrate on, or pay attention to, whatever was right in front of him. Not only did this lead him to waste his time on trivial tasks, but also to frustrate his staff, because nobody really knew what was important that day.
The trick with him was to get him to take a step back from the present so that he could star to see the patterns of his work life over the years (and extrapolating into the future seeing that unless he changed his behaviour, this pattern would continue until his retirement).
Although this has to be the start of the process, we then had to work on how he might work on this issue using a plethora of tools and techniques that I’ll share in future “Insights”. As you can see, we didn’t need to talk about the content of the issue (something that I find people already know and will talk about at the drop of a hat), what was important was to get him to recognise the patterns first.
One of the problems that we have as human beings is that we are lazy, once we find a way of working that generates some results, we keep on doing the same things; if we find that something doesn’t work, we drop that and go back to what we doing before, only more so. If we are to get better results, or solve more problems, we need to do something different, but that is hard work.
“System 1” & “System 2”
Daniel Kahneman describes this very clearly in “Thinking Fast and Slow”, he talks about “System 1” and “System 2” where “System 1” is our “robot” thinking that is mostly on autopilot and allows us to carry out mundane tasks like dressing, and eating and driving, so that we can talk with each other while performing these tasks, for example. Most of the time this works very well, and those of us who drive will be well aware of the experience of suddenly realising that we are close to the exit off the motorway, and ask ourselves, “who drove the last twenty miles?” We did, of course, but not all of us.
“System 2” kicks in when something out of the ordinary happens and we have to think differently; the “robot” isn’t able to resolve this issue. When working with the senior manager mentioned above, this was the point where he started to see the patterns that he couldn’t see when caught up in the everyday life of “business as usual”.
When I think about the coaching (and the training events) that I have been involved in over the decades, these have been the defining moments; when the person being coached had that sudden realisation of the patterns that they were caught up and in and kept repeating ad nauseam.
