Too often, when we speak about coaching we invoke the sports model as our guide—those professional sports coaches who pace the sidelines or the bull pens with their assistants at their side calling the next plays, cursing the players and the umpires, muttering some obscenities, and raging at an umpire’s decision that affects them adversely. This model does not apply to coaching the many professional and semiprofessionals who make up today’s workforce.
Phillip B. Crosby, in Quality is Free, wrote that "Quality was ballet, not hockey." He used the phrase to indicate that quality required unblinking dedication, patience, and time and that no single piece of information would clarify or resolve a quality problem. Coaching professionals is more like learning ballet; practice, practice, and more practice supported by dedication, discipline, patience, and understanding. The orchestra conductor brings out the best in each musician so that the final product achieves its share of bravos. In essence the conductor is the coach.
Coaching can relate to the professional’s discipline, related skills, attitudes, career issues, personnel problems, and future opportunities. As coach you provide guidance in developing interpersonal, operational, and administrative skills; those skills that are practiced in your particular organizational context. You also may be required to resolve problems related to nonperformance or underperformance. Your role as coach does not include providing the best answer. Your goal is to challenge the thinking processes, to ask the tough questions, to put the person or group on the right track without imposing your own prejudices. Coaching should be an exercise in self-discovery for individuals or groups. However, from your position as the manager, the coaching must eventually resolve the issue.
Improving performance through coaching requires face-to-face interaction; it can be done either individually or in small groups. It requires absolute integrity and open communication on the part of all participants in a nonthreatening environment. It should take place in relation to some specific work-related activity rather than some abstract and unreal scenario. You need to avoid playing the role of the psychologist. Leave those issues to the appropriate human resource specialist. You are not the father confessor to resolve everyone’s personal problems.