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Who Needs a Coach?

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Who Needs a Coach?

Who Needs a Coach? Are you talking to Me?

By Marsha Bailey, WEV CEO

When I was in high school, the words “girls” and “athletics” were rarely uttered in the same sentence. In those pre-Title IX days, team sports for girls were pretty much limited to cheerleading and marching band. My high school gym teacher sent us outside for a lap around the track for punishment, not fitness.

So when the field of executive coaching started to emerge, I was pretty clueless as to how a coach might help me. When I was growing up, my parents thought that the best way to teach me how to succeed was to adopt a mantra that boiled down to: “You’re on your own.” I interpreted this to mean, “Don’t ask for help because the only one you can depend on is yourself.” Besides, girls were raised to be helpers not helpees.

For a long time, my pull-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps strategy succeeded. One of my biggest personal assets is my love of learning. If you’ve taken Psychology 101, you might remember that there are three basic ways of learning:

1) Repetition – think multiplication tables, piano practice, Parlez-vous Francais? ;

2) Learning from other peoples’ experience – Save for a rainy day, turn off the lights;

3) One-trial learning or Ouch! That hurts! – You only have to put your hand in the fire once to learn not to do it again.

Unfortunately, many of us, me included, often choose the Ouch! approach. For us, love of learning might be confused with love of pain. Instead of asking for counsel, we make a decision, leap in and the outcome is so painful that we learn to never do that again. If you’re smart enough, and I like to think I am, you will eventually acknowledge that learning from other peoples’ experience is way less painful than learning from your own. That’s where a coach comes in. There’s a well-known saying: “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” By seeking out a wiser and more experienced person to help you, not only will you develop an array of tools with more finesse than a hammer, you will get better at assessing what your problems are.

As WEV’s founder, my role has changed many times over the past twenty years, just as yours will as a small business owner. In the beginning you do everything yourself, then you need to learn how to hire, manage and trust other people to do their jobs, to delegate, to teach, to listen, to support and to lead by example. Sometimes you’re ready for a change and sometimes you aren’t. It’s easy to delegate things that you don’t like to do or don’t do well. It’s harder to stop doing things that you enjoy and that you’re good at because it’s no longer the highest and best use of your time or perhaps not the best thing for your business. Hardest of all is to change your way of being.

The way we are in the world is the result of so many internal and external influences. Each individual is like a big ball of string. In the center is a tightly wound core around which we wrap more and more string representing all our hopes, fears, accomplishments and insecurities. To change the core, we have to start unwrapping and discarding some of the string.

A coach will help you do that. A coach helps you to look at what has helped you succeed in the past and figure out what you need to do differently to reach the next level of success that you’re aiming for. For me, it was to transition from WEV’s Executive Director to its CEO. As Executive Director, I had a hand in everything. I managed the day-to-day operations, the finances, wrote and managed most of our grants, designed programs and marketing strategies and recruited board members. Because I was the founder, I was the source of organizational history – sometimes the only source. My way of leading had always been to roll up my sleeves and “just do it.” I didn’t need Nike to suggest a work ethic.

As CEO, a position that WEV had never had and I had never filled, I was once again moving into uncharted territory. As Executive Director, I had never doubted my value to WEV. As the CEO, with an Executive Director and Development Director to take over many of my former duties, I knew I had to deliver a different kind of value. What was it, and how long did I have to think about it? Had I effectively engineered my own obsolescence?

A well-trained and effective coach will tell you that she is neither a therapist nor an advisor, but for me, coaching has been both therapeutic and instructive. For me, coaching is better than therapy because it doesn’t stop at identifying and understanding patterns of behavior. Coaching is pragmatic. It helps you recognize and build on your strengths, stop doing things that keep you stuck and start practicing new behaviors that help you break through to a new level of performance and fulfillment. Often, just observing how my coach both encouraged and challenged me taught me how to interact more effectively with staff. Sometimes, I didn’t know how to do what she asked: how to pose questions in a neutral fashion or keep my personal feelings at bay. She would suggest concrete language and techniques to elicit deeper discussion; techniques that would validate other people’s suggestions and honor both their knowledge and my own, even when that knowledge was contradictory.

The first time we met, my coach asked me what I was looking for in a coaching relationship. My answer was “clarity.” For me, clarity meant a vision of the future and a path to get there. My coach was a great sounding board. She was right there behind me, nudging me forward and blocking me from backsliding into the known and the comfortable. She assigned “homework,” suggested books, led cheers. She helped me emerge with a written plan that defined both my role and contribution to WEV’s future. Most importantly, she has taught me that a future filled with unknown possibilities is not something to be afraid of.

Many thanks to Pam McLean, CEO of the Hudson Institute, for making coaches available to WEV staff and clients and to my wonderful and talented coach, Nancy Cannon-O’Connell.

Find out how a coach could help you by clicking here.