Everybody Needs a Coach!

Everybody needs a coach! That’s what I’ve concluded after 35 years of working with CEO’s and senior executives. Honestly, I’ve been a skeptic for most of my life because I didn’t recognize the critical role of regular and unbiased feedback in maximizing performance.

If you think about it, we all grew up with coaches, in Little League and Pop Warner football and in every sport I can think of. Cheerleaders had a coach and so did the drama and debate clubs. The best teachers and professors are not simply instructors, but are coaches, too. Mostly they are coaching us, observing and monitoring, and coaching some more to bring out the best in us. To encourage us to take ownership of the course material, to be curious and eager to learn, to expand our thinking beyond the material required for the exam.

Coaching brings a different perspective to an issue. For mothers and fathers, too, coaching is a major part of their repertoire. Preparatory courses for the SAT’s, bar exams, M-SATS are all derivations of coaching, helping us prepare to do do our best on our journey.

So, what does a coach do and what benefit do you derive? How do these countless examples apply to business executives? After all, we’re all adults, seasoned professionals many of us. We already know how to play the game.

When you’re on the playing field, though, it’s hard to see if everyone’s doing their job, covering their duties and responsibilities, playing with the passion and discipline that winning requires. No matter what the quarterback may see, the coaches in the press box have a different perspective and see the challenges from an entirely different vantage point that likely alters the diagnostics as well as the solution.

We’re heard about this all of our lives – “two heads are better than one” – and all that. We’ve also learned that for every traffic accident, every observer reports it differently. Playing “gossip” in school distorts the original observation into an unrecognizable offspring of reality. But there’s a lot of value in kicking around ideas, concerns and conflicts with an independent observer whose unbiased feedback if focused on your success.

It’s refreshing to work with a keen observer to receive unvarnished and unbiased observation without fear of reprisal or judgment. To whom in your organization can you confide about your most gut-wrenching decisions without jeopardizing your relationship, your privacy or even your job? It’s an uplifting experience to consult with a coach without looking over your shoulder at someone’s reaction.

We have a love-hate relationship with accountability. None of us likes to hear about our shortcomings, what we can do better, where we haven’t followed our values and convictions. Yet, there’s nothing we appreciate quite as much as the discovery that we can do better, that we may have overlooked answers deep inside of us, and that we have a chance to make a course correction to improve our performance.

Why do the world’s greatest athletes all have coaches? Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, Roger Federer, Michael Phelps the list is endless. Why do we accept that these elite athletes all have a coach to improve performance, correct small hitches in their mechanics, even guide them to better nutrition, workout regimens and positive thinking? Brando, Pacino, Hoffman, DeNiro, Hackman, Streep, Hepburn, all went to acting school and continue to work with acting coaches to hone their skills, develop new roles and dialects and prepare for a major movie or special scene.

We can watch and be moved by their brilliance, discipline, creativity and talent. You can say it’s tradition in the sports and entertainment worlds and you’d be right. But, these adults can surely fire their coaches if they don’t provide value. But, they don’t, or if they do, they replace them with another. Why? Because they add value and bring out the very best in them to allow them to to reach world-class performance levels.

If a coach helped these icons ascend to the top of their profession  – why don’t YOU have a coach?