Coaching, Simple on Paper, Hard in Practice: The Real Work of Coaching.

If I were to describe, what coaching is, I could easily lay it out for you in four bullets. 1. Find out what a leader truly wants. 2. Surface what's standing in their way. 3. Build a plan to get past it and 4. help them develop the skills to make the plan a reality.

While this sounds simple enough, each of those four steps is deceptively hard to do well. The gap between how simple coaching sounds and how demanding it is in practice, is why good coaches train, get certified and build their experience over years.  

Step one the “WHY” as well as the “WHAT”

Most leaders can quickly answer the first question: what do you want.  More influence. A bigger role. A team that executes flawlessly. To be able to command more respect. To inspire others better. To be better able to work a room. But the answer is rarely the whole answer.

Behind it sits something they rarely examine what's actually driving what they want. The WHY question. What is their motivation? Ambition often stems from the need to impress someone no longer in the room. Sometimes it stems from a SHOULD, an obligation to something and not a true WANT. A coach can tease out the underlying drivers and help a leader make sure that the actuality of the thing they want meets their now real surfaced desire for it. 

Getting to what's true and not just what's on the surface takes trust, patience, and a coach willing to keep asking "why" past the point where most conversations stop.

The barriers are rarely the ones on the surface

Once you know what someone wants, the obstacles seem obvious. The need for more time, additional resources, a difficult stakeholder. While those may be real, they're rarely the whole story. 

Underneath the surface there are deeper barriers that leaders don't express so easily. These can include: Imposter syndrome underlying their caution, a fear of failure disguised as "its just not the right time", or a deeply hidden worry that success could mean more stress, longer hours, and less of themselves left over at the end of the work-day. The result is that some part of them holds back from a goal they believe they want.

These barriers don't pop up in the first conversation. They arrive in the fourth or fifth, once the leader trusts the coach enough to say the thing they've been managing around for years. Finding them isn't a simple diagnostic exercise. It's hard work, and it takes time.

A plan is a starting point, not an answer

Once the real goal and the real barriers are on the known, building a plan is the most straightforward part of the process. However, it's also the part where most leaders feel they are “done”.

Of course, it isn't. A plan is just a hypothesis. It has to be tested against the leader's actual week, their calendar, politics, their energy level. It will need to change and adapt. Leaders who are used to being right, used to having certainty in their answers, can find that uncomfortable. The plan is supposed to be imperfect at first. That is the process, not a flaw in it.

The skills that make it stick

This is where coaching earns its keep. A plan without the behavior change and mental toughness behind it is just a document.

Leaders need real skill-building here. They need to develop new habits of communication, decision-making, feedback, delegation and they need something less tangible but just as important: encouragement to stay in it. To run the experiment, watch it half-work, adjust, and try again. Most meaningful change arrives as a series of small, imperfect attempts that get a little better each time, made by someone who had enough support to keep going and learn something new after each misstep.

That's the piece that never fits on the whiteboard. Anyone can describe the four steps of coaching. Very few people can sit with a leader long enough to find out what they actually want, hold space for the fears they haven't said out loud, and stay in their corner while they experiment their way to a better version of how they lead.

The Take Away for Leaders

You likely already suspect you know what you want but haven't tested it, you may even know that something is holding you back but it’s not clear what it is. That's the starting point for every engagement I run.

Let's have a conversation about what's really going on and what it would take to move past it. Reach me at peter@pmbcoach.com.