Coaching the Coach--From the Bottom Up............

By Hap Cooper

If you are involved in soft skills training of any kind, the odds are good that you've pondered the subject of coaching--probably more than once. I am no exception and the subject came up again this week.
An old colleague of mine, Andrew Barer, used to make a pretty good argument for NOT training managers to coach their people. It wasn't that he didn't think coaching was a good idea--in fact, he was an exceptional coach himself. His take was that the managers who have the ability and inclination to coach already are. And the sizable majority who don't won't coach anyway--so why bother putting them (and yourself) through the agony. It's like the old adage that there are two major drawbacks to trying to teach a pig to dance: 1) It's not possible and therefore extremely frustrating, and 2) It annoys the pig.
Andrew's conclusion was that the coaching itself should be outsourced to professional coaches who have a niche in your particular industry. It made sense, but nobody I ever encountered in the real world ever adopted that approach institutionally. So we went on paying the bills by teaching managers how to coach and watching as nothing ever came of it.
Sometimes the top management team tried to mandate coaching by causing managers to record their coaching sessions on a form and submit them up the chain of command. Nice thought, but there was virtually no value given that the manager was just going through the motions--checking the box.
So, this week I heard a new approach for making coaching happen in the real world that I thought was quite inspired. A brilliant training designer I know named Larry Ledgerwood said that he has been having surprising success by teaching coaching NOT to the managers, but to the employees. They taught the whole course--two days. By showing the employees what they are missing and how valuable it is to their careers, the employees began to demand to be coached on a regular basis. They could also give their managers very specific guidelines around how they wish to be coached.
On top of that, it sparked an interest in peer coaching. It's always a lot easier to give a colleague objective feedback than to give it to yourself.
Larry said the idea has been viral within a couple of clients. Fascinating. How does the idea strike you?.