Is that coaching or not? What is coaching anyway? Every Olympic team and athlete has at least one coach. Every Pro Tour player has a coach. Every Premiership Team has a head coach, same for Championship teams. How come?

In many businesses and industrial sectors having a top coach is worn as a badge of honour, though not so it seems in the construction industry. An executive who had gotten himself a coach was told by a peer – ‘that’s not a good look, you’re supposed to know what you are doing’. And some of the execs I have coached over the years have told me they would not reveal our working relationship, concerned about how that reflects on them.

It seems coaching is not widespread in the construction industry.

I think there are many reasons for this, the main one being people don’t know what coaching is including some that call themselves coaches. I even come across HR people who you’d think would know but don’t – one said to me “Johnny is bloody useless; he really needs a good dose of coaching!”.

In an attempt to raise awareness, I am going to set out here what coaching is and is not so you can take responsibility and act accordingly.

Is:

• Coaching is raising awareness and responsibility – we all have blind spots that are holding us back. Once we are aware of them, we can do something about them, freeing up performance and progress
• Coaching is working with healthy coping adults, enabling them to achieve their objectives
• People want to advance, get to a better place – coaching is future focused and positive
• Coaching is different, expect weird questions
• Coaching is a balance between support and challenge
• It’s about creating and holding a safe space for generative thinking
• It’s about promoting ‘new’ thinking. You want to get to a different place which usually involves different actions. Your old thinking produces more of the same, so new thinking is needed. We are not talking about Albert Einstein, invention thinking but rather stuff you have not thought about before
• Coaching is a partnership not a service. In a service situation you might expect me to tolerate all your peculiarities and abuse though in a partnership I might be the only person on the planet who is honest with you. Particularly if you are everyone’s boss.
• In coaching we allocate thinking time together and stick to it and each of us turn up prepared and ready for the work.
• As my former coach, Claire Pedrick, says the process of coaching is like an airplane flight. At the start of each session, we are going to work out what the work is today – this is the take-off. Then we are going to do the work – cruising at 40,000ft and then we are going to check we have done the work – smoothly landing the session, together.
• At executive level, coaching is more about “being” – how the leader shows up and who they are – and much less about their “doing”. The leader brings their whole self such that their people are inspired to follow. This is not easy and yet, with the necessary inner work, it becomes natural.
• As a coach I am listening for beliefs and values rather than: history, background, situation, detail, problems (what coaches call ‘presenting issues’), scripts and ego.

Is not

• It’s not a friendly chat, though it can be if that’s ‘useful’ occasionally.
• It’s not teaching, giving advice, involvement in content or leading the thinkers thinking, nor is it telling what to do or even making ‘helpful’ suggestions.
• It’s not wrestling over opinions or fighting for airtime
• It’s not listening passively while the thinker constantly off loads
• It’s not counselling nor therapy or helping the thinker handle or heal from their past
• It’s not consulting or subject matter expert input.
• And it’s definitely not fixing people or seeking to change them to become your version of them.

How to find an experienced and qualified coach

Now we better understand what coaching is, is it OK to work with anyone who calls themselves a coach? I’d say, no it’s not. You need to find an experienced and qualified coach, that you get along with and trust.

Firstly, experienced. They need to be operating at your level. If you are CEO then, someone who works with C suite executives.

Qualified? If you are a recent graduate civil engineer you are academically qualified. You then put in seven years of hard work and gain chartered status – Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, MICE. You are now professionally qualified.

That’s what I mean by “qualified”, professionally qualified. Someone who has done a coaching course at a business school might be academically qualified but as yet they are not professionally qualified.

For me, becoming a professionally qualified coach took longer and was harder than becoming MICE (MICE was and remains massive for me, as does my FCIOB) and I am a much better coach for having gone through the credentialing process and done the work.

I’d recommend you look for a credentialed coach rather than a graduate. I am credentialed (PCC) with The International Coaching Federation (ICF) – “The Gold Standard for Coaching”

Having found such a coach, seek to have a few sessions with them to check out the chemistry between you; do you like working with them? Do you trust them?

Make sure you have a written Coaching Agreement – it’s an ethical requirement of the ICF. And then put your whole self into the work, you will be amazed at yourself and rightly so.

Johnny is amazing too. And he always was.

A version of this article was recently published in Trusted Coach Directory