Many years ago, my boss at the time mentioned that she was getting a coach for one of my colleagues. I recall that I felt a little sorry for the individual. My perception was that she had clearly been found lacking and probably needed her shortcomings addressed to stay in the game.
Boy was I wrong. It turned out that the individual had been identified as “talent” and in fact her skills needed to be further honed for future leadership development.
Notwithstanding this misunderstanding, when a coaching opportunity was presented to me, my instinct was that it was probably a waste of company money. I honestly didn’t need to be coached, did I? It’s not that I was thinking that I was particularly outstanding (ok, well maybe just a little) but on the main I belonged to the school of thinking that to get ahead you needed to ‘buck up’, ‘get on with it’ and rise to the challenges you face with sheer hard work and a robust pair of big-girl panties. Not spend hours talking self-indulgent nonsense to a stranger…
Now that I’ve emerged from a good season or two of intense executive coaching (and yes, it turns out I did need it) and having subsequently studied further to become a coach myself, I am an evangelist for the benefits of coaching for personal growth.
Yet often there remains a degree of resistance. A senior executive I’ve been working with has been trying to persuade one of her direct reports to identify a coach so that he can make some of the developmental shifts they’ve discussed. Yet for some reason, he just never makes the commitment. Why do some people struggle with the idea of coaching? What is this apparent blockage that many experience in the context of getting the help of an executive coach?
Coined in 1999 by then-Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias whereby people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognize their own incompetence. And not only do they fail to recognize their incompetence, they’re also likely to feel confident that they actually are competent. (Mark Murphy, Forbes 2017)
There are many barriers to personal development, but the most difficult one is quite simply ignorance about both one’s self and the belief that coaching is remedial rather than focused on enhancing performance.
The higher up you go in companies, the more you’re dealing with psychological and relational issues. Successful CEO leadership requires astuteness about others: their emotional and strategic personal drivers; their self-interest, overt and covert. These relationship competencies rest on a foundation of self-knowledge, self-awareness. And you can’t know the truth about another without knowing it about yourself. (Douglas LaBier, HuffPost 2013)
So if you’re thinking “how can a coach possibly help me?” perhaps it’s worth being open-minded enough to give coaching a chance. Not only is there a likelihood that your paradigms will be challenged, but feedback from an objective third party may give you a better understanding of your self and insight into the impact you are having on others.