The True Value of Coaching
How a hyper-tailored approach to your growth can compound over time to help you navigate the seasons of company building.
TLDR: Coaching is not the same as advising. It requires a much more hands on and adaptive approach to truly guide you to where you want to go, faster.
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The other day, I was talking to a few members of YPO and was really struck by the clarity they had about how the organization fits into their lives and businesses.
They all said that, “as a leader, you need your family, your therapist, and Forum,” — that’s where members talk about the real stuff they’re going through. It’s more like confidential group coaching than social hour.
I know not every leader qualifies or is even interested in the elite organization, but there is something important about the formula for support that these successful executives have come to leverage and pay for.
Having people in your corner who really get you is essential to your personal growth and your success.
Ask any MBA and they’ll say the most valuable part of business school wasn’t necessarily what they learned in the classroom, but rather who they met along the way. It’s about the network. More specifically, they talk about the individual relationships they formed that expanded their frame of reference. Sure, the business practices, case studies, and management theories are valuable too, but it’s the people (both peers and professors) who are often credited with a lasting impact. That’s because advice, mentorship, and a solid peer group is about having someone you know and trust to give you a new perspective or help you avoid hard lessons as you navigate your next moves.
Coaching Requires a Personalized Growth Map
Coaching is not the same as a good chat over coffee or even formal mentorship. Coaching — good coaching — is more like solutions-focused psychotherapy than advice. It helps you understand what you want and why you want it, then helps you get it. A good coach doesn’t tell you what to do, instead they are working with everything said and unsaid in the room to help you weigh a menu of options and pursue what works best for you.
I’ve seen too often coaches apply the same framework and strategies – a “proven method”– to a leader or company without ever getting into your mind or guts of you or your business. This can be dangerous. Being advised too generally can run the risk of leading you down a path you maybe never should have explored. It’s like the ultimate projection. You deserve more than a template slapped on to your growth. That’s why exceptional coaching requires a hyper-tailored approach to you and your goals. That also going to mean that a hyper-tailored approach requires hyper-tailored success metrics.
Outsized Returns
So, how do you measure the value of coaching? Well, it depends. Like many qualitative methods, the effectiveness and success of coaching is hard to measure. In leadership coaching, it’s even more difficult because you have both collective and individual level outcomes that influence each other.
Unlike sports, where you can measure success in game wins, championships, or personal records, business and entrepreneurship is often a longer game with more complex timelines, returns and variables. Sure, you can try to look to top-line business metrics like revenue to measure the ROI of coaching, but if that’s your only objective then perhaps what you really need is a good sales leader — or a good coach for your sales leader.
Instead, great coaching should get you both business results and personal results. It should accelerate the trajectory of your development, help you see around corners, and make critical decisions all with the clarity of your own psychology and business strategies.
Here are a few of our favorite qualitative and quantitative metrics to measure the impact of coaching:
Qualitative
Written or verbal feedback
Observed new or changed behaviors
Performance reviews and self-assessments
Quantitative
Retention
Attainment of Goals
Biological Age
Leadership Effectiveness Scores
Coaching Has Seasons
In every professional sport, coaching is the bedrock of the game. A good coach can run previously used winning plays, but a great coach can see the team, know where you are in the season, help you make critical adjustments during the game, and make up winning plays on the spot.
Having the right coach at the right time can be the difference between peaking too early or building on your legacy season after season. And just like professional athletes have seasons, so do business leaders. Maybe your season is a quarter, maybe it’s a year. Either way, you have to know what season you’re in to know what to focus on and how best to leverage your coach.
The Pre-Season
Your pre-season is the time to plan “The Plan.” It’s when you work on your weaknesses, have the strategic discussions about the bigger picture, make trades on the team, and set your sights and goals on what you need to accomplish for the regular season. This can look like an annual planning cycle, talent reviews, analyzing the competition, or removing any of the noise that will only be a distraction when you need to have your head in the game. With a coach, this is where you’re correcting that funky footwork, building new muscles, and practicing some new plays to see if they’ll get you a better result. And if you don’t have the capability to plan well on your team, this is also a great opportunity to leverage a coach who is really good at facilitating long-term planning and strategic decision making.
The Regular Season
This is showtime. It’s the longest season when points matter and the scoreboard decides who is going to make it to the finals. You can’t afford to waste too many cycles changing your mind about players or the strategy just because you took an L. You just have to execute, inspect your progress, and do everything you can to deliver results. And if you have to make an adjustment, you better be damn sure of the decision because it will cost you some momentum. During the regular season, a good coach keeps you going, focused on the plan and the plays, and patches you up when you’re hurt then to send you back in. They’ll give you the pointers along the way and unlock you when your psychology is getting in the way of the game.
The Finals
This is playoff season when you’re surrounded by top competition. You’re tired, you’ve racked up a record of wins and losses, your team might look a little exhausted from when you first started, and you’re feeling the pressure every second of the game. This is when high stakes-moments surface and everyone becomes tempted to throw those Hail Mary passes. In these moments, keep your coach close. They’ll be the one who is watching the field, help you use your time-outs to regroup or slow down energy, make sure you don’t get swept up in the pressure of it all.
The Off-Season
No matter how the playoffs went, every player needs an off season. But your job isn’t on hold just because you’re no longer in season. Whether you’re in between roles, on sabbatical, or finally have a little breathing room after a big project, your off-season is your time to recover, build a strong foundation, and get back to being at top of your game. Don’t totally disappear from your coach or your team. Sometimes the best stuff that gets uncovered for the next season is in the downtime of the off-season. This is when you need to take a breather, get some perspective, celebrate the wins, and reinvest in your relationships. You can leverage a coach a lot to rebuild any parts of the foundation that may have gotten cracked, or space out your sessions to give yourself a break from all the hyper-growth.
Like most things in life, you get what you give. So ask yourself, what season are you approaching and are you ready for it? If not, it might be time to find a good coach.
Great coaches aren’t always easy to find, once you do they can be in your corner forever.
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