Coaching as Your Map, Not a Last Resort
There’s a disconnect in our culture around coaching
We’re used to hearing high performing sportspeople talk about their coaches. In fact, we expect serious athletes to have a coach. But we don’t have the same culture of coaching in other areas of business and life.
For example, I started mountain biking again last year. I've always liked biking, but I've had enough accidents that I’d sworn off it off it for my own safety. However, now we live by the Adventure Park in Christchurch, with young children eager to give biking a go. So, I thought I’d give it another go and I booked some lessons with a mountain bike coach.
I was talking to family about how much I was enjoying learning, and someone said, “Why are you getting lessons? Don't you just go down the hill and get better each time?” I was quite shocked at his view, especially as his wife has a career as a coach. How does he not get the value of coaching? How many others share this view?
Then I thought about the skills I’m learning and wondered how I’d learn those without a coach. I could spend years trying, fail lots, and maybe get there eventually, but my body can’t afford that. I already fall off, even with a coach. And sure, I could pick up some skills from YouTube. But that real-time feedback from my coach telling me where to push harder and use certain techniques is so valuable. When I practise, I use my time more effectively because I know what I’m trying to achieve, and I'm progressing much faster as a result. There are things that I was ready to try and needed a verbal push to do.
Things have to get really bad before people ask for help
When we have a painful problem, we're happy to get advice because we don't know a way out. But when something is working fine, we’re much less likely to seek out support to meet our goals. The people who do are elite players. I can’t think of a single top athlete who doesn’t have a coach.
High performing businesspeople also often work with advisors. But oddly, businesspeople don't tend to talk about their coaches the same way sportspeople do. There's a bit of reticence to admit we pay for support. It’s as if we think working it all out by ourselves makes us better people. Sometimes coaching is even perceived as an admission of failure. For example, marriage counselling is seen as something you do if you're drowning, rather than developing relational skills that you might not have learnt in the environments that you'd been exposed to.
Don’t wait until you’re drowning to ask for help
There are two approaches to coaching:
- You need coaching because you’re drowning and you need a lifebelt.
- You want coaching because you’re keen to learn how to swim.
You're almost always better to engage a coach when you're still on dry land.
Asking for help also comes down to valuing your time as a finite resource. Yes, you could read a book or watch some videos to learn how to do something yourself. But what if that’s a poor use of your limited time?
What you see as a good use of your time changes throughout your life. When you're a student, you may have more time, and your time isn't worth as much to other people. It makes sense to DIY. As you get older your time hopefully becomes more valuable. Equally, skills aren’t always useful long term. For example, there are points in your life when being frugal is useful. But there are times when getting help is more important than saving money.
Knowing when to ask for help is about choosing what you want to be expert in and spending your time on that. You don't need to be an expert in all areas of life. Sometimes all you need is to get to a level that’s good enough or choose to outsource something altogether.
If you’re considering coaching make sure you find the right coach
My initial experience with business coaching was like talking to a coach who specialises in sprinting when I wanted to run a marathon.
My co-founder and I first started speaking with coaches in our first few years of business because well-meaning people suggested we could do with mentoring. But we found most coaches didn't even ask what we were trying to do with Smudge. They heard the word software and assumed we made a product and were trying to scale the company for acquisition. Our goal is to build a great consulting business. But consulting isn’t common in the tech sector, so coaches were baffled by business owners who didn’t want to scale, sell, and retire. As a result, a lot of their advice missed the mark. And that was partly because I didn't know what our coaching needs were, or what to look for in a coach.
It’s key to have a coach who really listens, understands where you're trying to go, and works out what support is appropriate for you. You don’t want a coach who takes a cursory look at your problem, says, “I've seen this pattern before, I know how to fix this,” and sells you a solution that doesn’t suit your situation. It’s also important to choose a coach who has a proven track record in the thing you want to achieve.
Talking of coaching and track records …
We’re launching a new software advisory service that includes coaching organisations through big software investments. When I say new, we’ve been advising businesses on software challenges for years as part of software development. However, now we’re offering software advisory as a standalone service.
And we’ve had to overcome our own expert humility to do this because it’s easy to undervalue skills that feel straightforward to us. With many software advisory projects, part of me thinks, this problem is too easy, why would an organisation pay for help with this? Then I remind myself a challenge is only basic for us because we live and breathe software. Sometimes these are problems organisations have been struggling with for months or years, or they simply need an outside perspective.
A business problem can also be a symptom of a deeper root cause. Organisations come to us because they think they need custom software, but sometimes software might not be the right solution for their needs. That’s when we say, “Sure, we can build you some software. But let’s identify the real root cause of this problem first because you may find software isn’t the best fix.” That’s where software advisory can help.