What is coaching? And what is it not?

Think about a business performance coach in the same way you think about a tennis coach or a golf coach -- they can't hit the ball for you, but they can assess a baseline level of performance and then help you prioritize the skills and assets that you want to improve.

In a business setting, the key skill for which an executive may need coaching could be problem analysis. This is particularly common among leaders who have good intuition but who are not framework oriented.

Alternatively, while some leaders are very direct and to the point concise, others may be discursive and inductive and can lose their audience even though their message is correct and their topic is important. In that environment, the core skill could center around communication styles.

A third area could involve emotional self-regulation. It may be dealing with conflict and recognizing how that hinders their ability to negotiate or to exert influence.

I often point to the concept of a ‘goodwill bank,’ something built up over time that establishes trust and credibility

I ask leaders to identify their own goodwill bank -- who do you have it with, how have you developed it and how are you sustaining it? It can be an internal network within the company or an external network to the broader environment they're operating in.

With younger leaders, or older first-time leaders, executive coaching often starts with demystifying the process. Almost always there's an assessment phase where the CEO and I, will talk about what's important to them and what they want to achieve.

This assessment stage is critical to agreeing what are we going to work on and identifying how we know if we’re moving forward.

If I’m providing coaching to a CEO of a venture-backed startup, the assessment often involves talking to the investment professionals with whom they work closely to identify opportunities and room for improvement. It could involve talking to their board of directors or to their team. If they've had a recent 360, that's helpful, but very often they don't. If they're vulnerable enough and confident enough to say, ‘Yeah, I'd actually kind of like to know what the board says,’ I think it's very important.

We're not going to tackle everything – we’ll identify maybe two or three of these areas that they’d like to improve or they’d like to improve their performance in. We identify why we’re prioritizing those areas, driving everything back to first principles -- What business and personal objectives are you optimizing by focusing on better strategy development, better board management or better team management?

Then we work through the content of the plan. I'm working with a CEO right now on more systematic thinking and the communication that comes out of it, and often I point to a book called The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto. It's the single best book ever written in my view about how to structure your thoughts in a way that ensures your writing has informed your thinking, not just the other way around.

Lastly comes the logistical parts of the planning -- How are we going to schedule our sessions? How often are we going to meet? What work are you going to get done on your own? What are you going to send me for review before the next session?

I'm a big believer in homework. So if you say, ‘I really want to work on a tough, potentially confrontational meeting with a board member,’ I’ll make sure they’re thinking intentionally about the points they have to land and how they will articulate those.

It’s easier to work through these scenarios when you’re not working from a blank page. If you’ve spent time detailing your thoughts, picking apart the problems of your own logic and thinking through the logic of your own arguments, now I can make informed suggestions. We can debug this together.  

Throughout the engagement, there will be interim assessments. Let's say this is a six-month engagement. Where are we after month one? Are you engaged? Are you doing the homework? Are you canceling meetings? Am I working, as far as you're concerned? Are you getting value out of this emerging relationship?  And then probably again at three months and then at the end of the engagement, where have we gotten to?

There’s always a lot of compassion here. These are almost always good people, often overloaded and sometimes feeling isolated. Striking the right balance in content, tone and expectation is important.

Coaching is neither exclusively mentorship nor exclusively therapy, but there is a time and a place for all three.

A mentor will typically be a long-term person in your network who shares industry insights and wisdom gained through experience, while a therapist will likely address past trauma, emotional challenges and mental health concerns. By contrast, a coach will help you achieve specific goals, developing skills and strategies that you can deploy in your business or personal life immediately.

Ultimately, coaching is the old Chinese proverb about teaching a man to fish. A therapist might dig into the reasons from your childhood why you don’t want to fish; a mentor might help you get the fish; a coach will help you ask the right questions, giving you the space and confidence to learn the skills and techniques needed to catch the fish on your own.

Good coaches are much more interested in a feedback mechanism that lasts beyond the sessions and even beyond the engagement.