The Business Case for Coaching

Without Coaching Training Value is Lost

The principle argument for coaching is this: Regardless of how good the classroom training is – most of the effectiveness is lost unless it is followed up with reinforcement and coaching.

According to a study conducted by the Xerox Corporation, 87 percent of the desired skills change was lost without follow-up coaching. The implication is that no matter how good the classroom training is, the effectiveness is lost without on-the-job reinforcement.

Look at the graphic to the right and you’ll see the effects of coaching. If you have no training or coaching, results are minimal, period. With training, you get better results initially, but they drop off. Where you have training and coaching, you achieve maximum results.

“Without coaching, very few people can maintain a newly acquired skill.”

--Neil Rackham – The Coaching Controversy

Think of it like this. Your people are all race horses calmly chewing grass in the field. They’re not worth much to you like that are they? You need to teach them to go into and out of the gate, to run under control on the turn, to accelerate on the straight away, and finish strong. Do you think you teach that once and it’s set for life? No. Training isn’t a one-time event. It is on-going. The results you expect are to produce fast horses. The results you want are to produce winners. And, you know that unless the training is consistent, you’ll have very expensive pasture horses – not winners.

Your people can prove themselves to be the driving forces behind increased profitability, or they can slow you down. It depends entirely on how effective you are at teaching them to be winners. And, it requires two steps. First, you teach them new skills. Then, you teach them how to use those new skills in different situations.

The Fortune is in the Follow-Up

In order to get sustainable results, and see them on the bottom line, you have to follow-up. You have to help team members integrate new skills and know-how so they can do it on their own under fire. That’s how performance improves.

Learning and integrating new skills can be difficult and frustrating. Improvements typically are not immediate, and often decline while the new skills are being practiced. This lack of improvement causes many people to give up on the new skills and revert to their old ways. It is this exact point where the coaching becomes the life-saver.

Actually, when performance dips, what’s happening is that the new skills are working their way from conscious competence to unconscious competence. Specific coaching is the only way to make sure the skills make that journey.

The New Year’s Resolution Syndrome

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution? Here’s what often happens. You get motivated and take action. You see some improvement in the short term, but after a few weeks you find your commitment has dropped off.

We call that the “Discipline Dip.” Gradually you lose focus. You even forget to work toward your new goal. The Discipline Dip is like lifting weights to strengthen a weak muscle. Most people give up and start working on muscles that are already strong. When you lose focus and forget to work on the goal, your mind is reverting to the stronger neuro pathway. The result, you regress back into your old patterns and behavior.

Again, this is the exact point where coaching becomes the life-saver. Coaching helps you get through the lag time – the time between early commitment and results. Think about it. You’ve developed patterns of behavior over many years and it’s unrealistic to think you’ll change them over night – no matter how much motivation you can stir up. It’s essential to maintain the discipline and focus during the lag time. That’s the job of coaching.

The Best Use Coaches

If you take a look at the world’s top performers across all professions, you’ll find a common denominator – the best use coaches.

Sports stars like Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong both use coaches. Tenor Lucianco Pavarotti uses a coach. Actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Hilary Swank use coaches. Even Bill Gates uses a coach!

The world’s great performers are continuously trying to improve their skills; that’s how they reach such a high level of performance. And the means to their skill level is inevitably great coaching.

The reason we need coaches is that we simply can’t see ourselves. Very few humans possess what’s known in acting as a “transcendental ego,” the ability to clearly see yourself in real time as though you’re looking through someone else’s eyes. In other words, many top performers do not have a clue what it is they do that is so successful. Ever receive a compliment that you didn’t understand? Same thing.

We need another person to scrutinize our strengths with a critical eye and help us build on them. We need the assistance of a world-class communicator who can recognize our weaknesses and can inform us about them in a way that encourages us, rather than deflates us. We need a mind’s eye outside ourselves to help us understand ourselves today and who we can be tomorrow – then make sure we get there.

What is Coaching?

Coaching is a multi-phased process of:

Providing ideas and inspiration for the achievement of the desired result
Giving salespeople real-life situations in which to practice their new skills
Integrating and expanding skills

Keys to a world-class coaching plan

The requirements for an excellent reinforcement program include four elements:

The ability to anticipate the results dip
A coaching plan that provides the reinforcement and encouragement to help people through this period
Consistency.
Continuance. Once the new skills are nurtured and developed to a point where you can start to see success, coaching becomes even more instrumental.

Unless the sales person is guided and nudged into applying the new skills perfectly, they will likely develop a flawed swing or an inconsistent stroke. It is the coach’s job to make sure the new skills, and the results themselves, become a part of the salesperson’s natural ability, and that they use them with consistent excellence.

When planning for coaching and reinforcement it's critically important to be clear on the specific skills or behaviors to be coached, and to provide clear definitions of what is expected and the criteria for acceptable performance.

Who to Coach?

Because there is a limited amount of time and energy in every organization, it’s unrealistic to think that you can, or even should, coach 100% of your people. How then do you decide which people will get the coaching?

A typical organization breaks down something like this. 20% top performers, 20% at the bottom, and 60% somewhere in the middle.

Most organizations also have an 80-20 rule at play which says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the performers.

With that in mind, where is coaching best applied? The bottom 20%, the 60% in the middle or with the top performers?

The answer is with the top performers and the potential top performers.

As Peter Drucker so eloquently said in a 1999 Harvard Business Review article Managing Oneself:

“It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet, most people – especially most teachers and most organizations – concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.”

Characteristics of World Class Coaches

Effective coaches:

Recognize natural talents and let people be who they are (don’t try to “fix” natural talents)
Focus on effectiveness rather than efficiencies (it’s about results, not activities!)
Are optimists about human nature
Encourage people to take risks and learn from their mistakes
Support them as they make mistakes
Listen more than they talk
Are candid, but provide feedback in the right size dose
Cultivate personal accountability and ownership
Show by example
Are continuous learners

Here is a great example of item number 1. Mack Brown is the Head Coach of the University of Texas football team. That’s the 2006 National Champion football team. Coach Brown learned the value of doing things a bit differently. It was when he stopped trying to “fix” quarterback Vince Young.

Coach Brown had already tried to fix Young’s three-quarter throwing motion and was unsuccessful. Coach Brown had already tried to turn Young into a sprintout, bootleg quarterback, and was frustrated because Young’s performance was declining. Amazingly, it was when Coach Brown quit trying to fix Young, that his quarterback became a stellar performer.

Great Coaches Reinforce Behavior not Results

Its important to draw a fine line between behaviors and results. If the skill is driving a golf ball, the behavior is the swing; the result is where the ball goes.

If we’re talking about selling, a behavior might be asking questions; a result might be that the customer places an order.

If we’re talking about customer service, a behavior would be matching the caller’s voice. The result would be a happier customer and maybe an extra order.

In other words, a behavior is the specific thing that you learn to do. The result is the outcome of the behavior.

This distinction is important because typically learners use a new behavior for some time before it produces the desired results. It’s important that learners don’t get discouraged during this period.

Neil Rackham, in Building Interactive Skills, explains what happens when new learnings are not reinforced:

We asked 200 people, who had taken golf lessons, whether they performed better or worse after the lesson. Out of those people, 176 said that their next round was worse. In an ideal world, these 176 people would not be discouraged but would persevere with the new skills until it brought results. In reality, more than 100 of those golfers said that, rather than continue with the new swing or grip, they quickly went back to their old habits because they thought the results were better.

Great coaches Unleash Potential

Great coaching involves unleashing the human spirit and expanding people's capacity to stretch and grow beyond self-limiting boundaries. Coaching should not start with goal setting and problem solving, but rather with exploring the underlying concepts or mental models that a person uses to make meaning. What are the assumptions and beliefs that determine behavior? The truly effective coach knows that you can't solve a problem before you know what the problem really is.

Before he or she can focus on performance issues, a masterful coach guides the exploration process, identifying openings where there may be blind spots. He or she helps to clarify what really matters to the person being coached.

Together, they look towards alignment of personal and organizational goals. Only then can there be commitment to right action within the context of the organizational culture and business reality.