Coach trip
The coaching industry is ripe for disruption, says Myles DowneyThe final scene of the classic film The Italian Job is a cliffhanger – quite literally.
If you haven’t seen it, it goes like this. Michael Caine and his gang of gold thieves are escaping with their booty through the Alps, when the coach they’re travelling in suddenly goes into a skid. (They’ve all, driver included, been drinking.) The back of the vehicle teeters on the edge of a cliff. Will the coach get back on the winding Alpine road – or will everyone on board tumble photogenically to his doom?
The coaching industry is arguably – pun intended – in a comparable predicament. In many ways, coaching is looking at another golden age: economic growth has led to a resurgence of companies looking for executive coaching.
But this boom hasn’t stopped a number of commentators – including Myles Downey – suggesting that the industry could find itself tipping over the edge of a steep precipice any time soon.
Downey should know. His book, the recently revised and retitled Effective Modern Coaching, has sold tens of thousands of copies. Downey founded The School of Coaching, has launched an automated coaching system called Enable, and continues to think creatively about what coaching should do to properly up its game.
‘The problem,’ he opines, ‘is that coaching is mostly focused on learning and development, but should be focused on performance. Plus, few coaches have senior management experience, and others are simply not skilful enough.’
Pretty damning. But let’s wind back, unpack it, and see what others think.
Coach class
‘Some people call themselves a coach,’ says Downey, ‘and their only training is a couple of days of NLP back in 1999. The issue here is that there are no agreed levels of proficiency.’
Google the terms and you’ll find plenty of providers of coaching, training and supervision. The problem is that there’s no universal platform and, in the UK at least, pretty well anyone with the chutzpah can say they’re a coaching supervisor.
Consequently, there are lots of people out there, says Downey, who ‘don’t even have the most fundamental skill – the ability to allow the player to think for themselves, unguided by the coach.’
(Note: Player is the word Downey used instead of ‘coachee’. ‘Coachee’ suggests someone who has something done unto them’, says Downey – think ‘divorcee’ – ‘whereas ‘player’ suggests enjoyment, and that he or she is the primary person.’)
‘It’s generally accepted that the essence of coaching is ‘non-directive’,’ says Downey. ‘That means not directing someone’s attention, but enabling them to follow their own line of thought. Many people who say that their approach is non-directive seem to think that dressing up their thinking as a question qualifies.
‘The problem is that the player doesn’t get a chance to think for themselves, and so discover independence of thought and, subsequently, independence of action.’
Downey isn’t alone in bemoaning the calibre of coaches. Simon Buck, a business coach who specialises in SMEs, agrees wholeheartedly.
‘There’s been too many people coming into the industry having taken early retirement or redundancy and believing they can coach,’ Buck says. ‘The market is currently awash with people with little formal training or on-going education.’
Downey also suggests that many coaches simply haven’t operated at a high enough level to be useful to top executives.
Level best
‘Most coaches fail to significantly challenge the player’s thinking because they don’t have sufficient experience of the player’s role or level of management,’ he says.
‘You only have to attend a coaching conference and look around to realise that the majority of the people there have never operated at senior management levels, and don’t have experience at the coal face’.
Downey confesses to walking out of coaching conferences after just five minutes, because they were ‘so bad.’
‘There’s been little or no real innovation in coaching since it began in the mid 1980s. This is an industry caught in the past,’ he says.
The average age of coaches – they are very, very rarely ‘digital natives’ – means that technological revolution hasn’t happened on any meaningful scale.
Most coaches, Downey suggests, can send emails, but that’s about where their technological expertise ends.
Similarly, the old-school arrangement of coaches meeting clients face-to-face for an hour, once a month, in the client’s office, is looking increasingly archaic. ‘It’s borrowed from the psychotherapy model, and it’s popular because it’s easy for the coach and the HR manager to administer. But sometimes players need something different – like short ten-minute conversations – to keep them focused.’
Simon Buck also says tech is an area in which coaching will be disrupted. ‘Coaching must offer a full suite of tools and programs to support the fast moving pace and the modern technological developments of business,’ he says.
Buck coaches within social media platforms; Downey points to automated coaching platforms as another example of looming change.
Coaching culture
Recently there’s been a surge of interest in making managers up their coaching skills – but even this well-intentioned move seemingly has its complications.
‘Many managers are afraid of coaching, because it feels like they are surrendering control. They’re not given any idea how appropriate control (management) and enabling (coaching) sit together alongside leadership,’ says Downey.
‘The waters are further muddied by well-intentioned HR managers trying to create a ‘coaching culture’. Why? I think a high performance culture, which includes coaching as a subset, might actually be more useful.’
Downey writes passionately about this confusing coach/manager Venn diagram in his book:
In one company I know of, it is almost impossible for a manager to give a direct instruction to a member of staff – they have to coach. I think this is just clumsy or incomplete thinking, and it can have the effect of undermining the manager and, ultimately coaching itself. It is important to separate one circle from the other.
So, what’s the future – if coaching is to be disrupted, how will it be and for what reason?
The sharp end
Downey believes the future is one of ‘sharper engagement’ – that is, tying coaching to a performance imperative.
‘Sadly, many coaches are afraid of pinning their colours to the mast of performance,’ he says. ‘Imagine a sports coach who was solely concerned with development – he or she wouldn’t last a week. When I sit with a prospective player, my question is: ‘What is the job we’re to do together?’ If there is no ‘job,’ then there is no coaching.’
‘Business owners today are looking for more than just accountability, self-development and awareness,’ Buck says. ‘They’re also looking for proven techniques and strategies to grow – growth experts in their roundest form, rather than just a coach as a second set of eyes.’
If any coach looks and sounds like a disrupter, it’s Ebonie Allard. She describes herself as ‘a certified Coach, a Misfit turned Maven, an Adventurer, a Yogini and a Tattooed Badass Chick who dedicates her days to enabling freelancers, business owners and entrepreneurs to move from ARGH! To AHHH!’
Allard shares the drift, if not necessarily the vocabulary, of Downey and Buck’s argument. ‘It’s no longer about a time for money transaction,’ she says, ‘but about a value for money transaction. The days of listening for an hour and then saying, thank you but your time is up, are well and truly over.’
It’s time for all industries, not least coaching, ‘to really think about the problem they are providing a solution to.’
Allard sees half her clients face-to-face, and the other half online. But the deal remains the same, whatever the channel. ‘People want to know that they are going to be cheer-led and challenged. That they will be supported and cared for, but called on their bullshit if they are not staying accountable or making excuses.’
Genius ahead
Downey continues to investigate original, more contemporary and connected forms of coaching.
His latest concept is the idea of ‘enabling genius.’ Why the new language? ‘The word ‘potential’ has kind of lost its potential,’ he says. ‘Genius, and the proposition that everyone has the capacity for genius, is far more interesting.’
Downey has convened an international group called The Enabling Genius Research Project, which aims to bring together the latest and best thinking on the realisation of human potential. ‘There’ll be better coaching output when it’s based on better quality thinking,’ Downey says.
The key deliverable of this project will be a model, one that is already taking shape around the pillars of identity, drive, mind-set and learning.
But however it ends up, there’s no question that the Enabling Genius intention is to build a coach/player experience miles away from the usual grey-haired-coach-in-your-office-teaching-you-about-listening routine.
Downey smiles. ‘Enabling Genius will be all about finding the highest order of self-expression,’ he says. ‘In other words, helping people to achieve extraordinary things, and making them far more fulfilled in their lives.’
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