The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss - in professional tennis and golf the athlete hires and fires the coach, but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. “He never tells you what to do,” another writer said. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. You graduate. You’re done. You can go the rest of the way yourself.

Coaching considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection. It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components. In sports, coaches focus on mechanics, conditioning, and strategy, and have ways to break each of those down, in turn. The U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden, at the first squad meeting each season, even had his players practice putting their socks on. He demonstrated just how to do it: he carefully rolled each sock over his toes, up his foot, around the heel, and pulled it up snug, then went back to his toes and smoothed out the material along the sock’s length, making sure there were no wrinkles or creases. He had two purposes in doing this. First, wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters cost games. Second, he wanted his players to learn how crucial seemingly trivial details could be. “Details create success” was the creed of a coach who won ten N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships.

There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable - and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable.  So outside ears, and eyes, are important for winning sports teams and Olympic-level athletes.  What about regular professionals, such as business owners and/or executives, who just want to do as well as they can?

Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and career development coaches.  Search the Internet, and you’ll find that there’s even Twitter coaching.  Self-improvement has always found a ready market; it's teaching with a trendier name.  Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual.  It's also riskier: bad coaching can make people worse.

Good coaches let the person-being-coached choose the direction for coaching.  The coaching client usually knows better than anyone what his or her difficulties are.  Good coaches speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.  They parcel out their observations carefully.

The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things.  In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require?  With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury - you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.

The Myth of Individualism

The greatest difficulty, though, may simply be a profession’s willingness to accept the idea. The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure.  The myth of individualism can negatively affect our chances for success.

Most people think it is important to "go it alone" due to their belief in the myth of individualism; they hold tightly to the idea that everyone succeeds or fails on the basis of individual efforts and abilities. This assumption is so powerful that when an alternative view is suggested (that success depends on our relationships with others as much as it does on us) the usual reaction is denial. Denial of the role of relationships in the executive's success preserves the self-enhancing illusion that we are masters of our own fates and, therefore, deserving of all the credit for our successes.

For society, too, there are uncomfortable difficulties: we may not be ready to accept - or pay for - a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely, and yet hold in confidence what they see.

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.  Yet, the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it.  And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement. 

Are we ready to confront this fact when we’re in their care?

Source: The New Yorker, October 3, 2011