The tedium of coaching

I wonder what the collective noun for a group of coaches should be? A posse? A gaggle? A coven? Perhaps a superfluity or an excess? 

A 1980s manager returning to her office (or more likely, hot-desk workstation) would have found a ubiquitous water-cooler, over-priced coffee vending machine (mocaccino is my favourite), photocopier, bank of computers and servers cluttering the way to her desk and would also have needed to elbow her way through a veritable army of coaches and mentors.

Stepping past the executive coach, or perhaps the team coach, the change coach and the performance coach, she may have wandered away to the health suite downstairs to find a fitness coach, visited the styling coach in Harvey Nichols, then dashed home for her appointment with her life coach. Will coaches eventually follow us to the grave? Ghastly realisation: they already do. Never forget the bereavement coach.

It prompts me to wonder 'does anyone do anything anymore?' Or is everyone a coach feeding off others in what is already established as a service industry in its own right? How on earth did we manage before every junior, middle and senior manager was accompanied through work's and life's journeys by the omnipresent coach? 

So, in a new era of training austerity, surely we should revisit our coaching policy to question if there is real value in providing quite so much to quite so many.  

Where do coaches come from? It always amazed me how quickly the IT industry spawned legions of programmers, hardware and software designers, applications specialists, support teams, from nowhere at all. I suspect that it is in the same dark hole that coaches are created. We know so little about them, especially if they are an external resource, beyond of course the glowing biographies and testimonies from goodness-knows-who written goodness-knows-when.    

This is still largely an industry with a low entry point on qualifications and experiences, no single system of accreditation and with a range from the totally exceptional to the totally inept all under the one word 'coach'. 

Coaching starts well enough, of course. First meetings usually do. A few moments of hope as the coaching relationship is formed. Hope springs from the well of eternity, perhaps it will not be so bad after all - 'I liked him' is our considered assessment. 

Then we move inevitably to diagnosis - our journey into the self and into the past. We love diagnosis. From the coachee position, it is either a narcissistic self-indulgence or a relief that we are not quite as dysfunctional as we feared; for the coach, it is the affirmation of his power and knowledge.

This preoccupation with diagnosis and looking back must stop. Harry Stack Sullivan, working during the 1930s in an America obsessed with self-examination of its past rather than a lively focus on its future, commented: "The ultimate aim (of the psychiatric interview) is to help the patient change ... I am very much more interested in what can be done than what has happened." Comprehensive Psychiatry Vol 23 Issue 6: Nov-Dec 1982 pp545 - 551

So often the coaching process drives us through a number of sessions, which appear to have some linear progression leading towards a pre-ordained conclusion. I blame Excel and PowerPoint for this. Both give us the structural templates, first of all, to put everything into a defined box within a fixed spreadsheet and, secondly, to suggest that coaching progress is simply a question of moving through an imaginary slide deck. 

How I long for some stream of consciousness, for some wild, extravagant journey through the unknown - whether it be Joyce's Ulysses or the madcap adventures of Tristam Shandy - I want someone who makes me feel full of life, joyful, strong, capable and fun. I want to enjoy the unknown journey far more than I want to arrive safely at a pre-determined destination. 

Coaching should excite, amuse, shock, challenge, strengthen and confirm the joy of life. It should be a rip-roaring adventure with the dangerous-to-know coach. Protect me, please, from the tedium of so much current coaching practice. (Present company excepted of course.)

Stuart Walkley is director of Oakridge Training and Consulting. He can be contacted on +44 (0)1625 572474, at info@oakridgecentre.co.uk  or via www.oakridgecentre.co.uk