How To Get Coach Ready

Effective coaching empowers employees, strengthens teams, and aligns individual aspirations with business objectives, resulting in a more productive, motivated, and resilient workforce. But for coaching to be effective the person set to be coached needs to be ready to receive it.

Entering into coaching is a two-way agreement. Relationships build over time, but the coach must listen to their initial intuition just as much as the person being coached uses their gut to make a decision about fit. This ensures that every party extracts value from the coaching assignment – that’s the person being coached (the thinker), their line manager, the organisation as a whole, and the coach.

Whether a coach is working in-house or coaching external clients, it is important that attention is paid to the coaching readiness of the person being coached. It is also crucial to remember that not every issue is coachable and not every person is ready.

Good fit or not

There are a number of signs that coaching is not a good fit, the most obvious being that the individual clearly has no desire to change. But also look out for the individual being pressured into coaching when they don’t really want it or see a need for it – even if this coercion is well-meant.

Coaching is also not a good fit if the subject matter requires more of a therapeutic intervention or is a physical health issue; there are others more suitably qualified to work with the individual in these arenas. Or if the individual has just taken on a new role (such as a first-time team lead) it may be that they really need relevant training before coaching.

There may be cases where the individual’s line manager has neglected their own developmental responsibilities, therefore failing to nip falling standards in the bud, and wishes to outsource to a coach to “fix” the person. HR needs to intervene here to challenge the line manager to manage performance. This is often a systemic issue where line managers are not held to account for managing people.

And it could be that the timing is not right for the individual or the organisation. This is a tricky one to gauge because coaching can really help people in times of big change to get to grips with their own transition through that change; but sometimes the change can be such a distraction as to fragment the individual’s focus and their ability to engage in the coaching.

If you coach within an organisation (as an internal or external coach), these aspects need to be screened for by the coaching custodian (HR, L&D, Talent professional) such that when you agree to a compatibility call (the preliminary conversation between a coach and a potential client to assess whether they’re a good match for working together), coaching is deemed to be the right intervention at the right time for the right person. Also expect the coaching custodian to have explained to the individual how coaching works and how to make the most of it.

Coachability

Coachability isn’t about having things done to you in a passive manner. Many dictionary definitions talk about coachability as being receptive to feedback and instruction, being malleable, responsive, obliging, conformable – which is all very reactive.

These descriptions are almost the polar opposite of what I mean by coachability, which is much more proactive and comes from within the thinker: a willingness to think for themselves, having or being willing to build a sense of agency, of self-efficacy, taking the initiative, leaning in.

The role of a coach is to pull coachability out of the thinker, rather than attempting to pour something in through teaching and telling. Coachability and agency can wax and wane, so you need to bring it into your own and the thinker’s awareness and discuss how to nurture it at any given time in the coaching process.

How willing are they to go deep in their thinking versus superficial thinking or asking for your thinking? What about their willingness to make change happen in their life and work? What about their psychological readiness for that change? Homeostasis is so much more comfortable (even if it’s painful) than change, because it’s about what we know as opposed to what we don’t know. How willing are they to push past the discomfort of change?

Curiosity is key

If a thinker comes to coaching believing that there’s only one right answer (a fixed mindset, ostensibly developed to pass exams), the coaching may feel more difficult for them. As coaches, we can nurture more of the growth mindset, the desire to find multiple ways of seeing the world, by adopting a few underpinning mindsets of our own. First, that coaching is ‘a joint endeavour to discover new thinking’. New thinking, not known thinking.

Second, creating value is important in coaching, but your role as coach is to cultivate that value via the thinker rather than taking that mantle for yourself. Yes, the coach has the thinker’s best interests at heart, but that best interest is in building their thinking muscles rather than doing the thinking for them.

Third, the thinker is ‘creative, resourceful and whole’ and therefore they’re perfectly capable of creating that value. By seeing the thinker as creative, resourceful and whole, you’re also holding in mind the best version of this person in front of you that they might have forgotten about. Sometimes the thinker has lost their own connection with this best self, and you can rekindle hope by reconnecting them with the wholeness of who they are.

Tapping into their own resourcefulness involves (among other things) cultivating hope within the thinker, hope that they can go forward once coaching has finished: ‘…hopeful thought reflects the belief that one can find pathways to desired goals and become motivated to use those pathways’.

With all that as context about what coachability is, look at your whole coaching process through a coachability lens:

Ask yourself the following questions:

How are your introductory and ongoing emails written with coachability front and centre?
How do you incorporate discussions of coachability in your coaching agreement and three-way agreement conversations and written documentation?
How is any preparatory work that you send out written with coachability in mind? And the reflective practice after each session?
What do you consider within a coaching session to draw out coachability?
How do you co-create the experiments that might happen in between sessions, to build self-efficacy and agency?
And at the end of a coaching programme, how do you reflect together on ways to keep that agency?

This is an end-to-end experience you are designing, with coachability at its core, building agency and self-efficacy one stimulus at a time.