Coaching has to be sense-ible

My ears perked up when I heard that Atul Gawande--my favorite surgeon/writer--has a piece in the New Yorker about coaching for professionals. You can read the whole thing online here.

Gawande’s piece skillfully  lays out the benefits and
barriers to coaching for professionals – people whose skills are already
at a certain level but who want to keep learning and improving. As
someone who is (almost) mid-40’s, doing complex work that few people
fully understand, I could relate at nearly every turn as he described
the desire to improve.  I was pleased that he names not only athletes, 
but also  musicians (who are, after all small-muscle athletes)  as
examples of the ways that an outside set of eyes and ears can be
invaluable to someone who already knows their business but knows they
can also get better. It doesn’t matter how many people are
watching what you do; if the only feedback you get is “Nice sermon,
pastor,” you’ll never know the real impact of your work, or what you
could be doing differently. Hearing someone comment on your use of
silence,  your body language, or your pacing, however, makes a world of
difference.

My own experience with so-called coaching in recent
years, however, has been the very opposite of the sort of well-trained
attention a professional coach might give. “Coaching” is now used as a
catch-all for all kinds of relationships that lack a key element of
coaching –namely physical presence. If you’re a writer, an editor can be
just about anywhere. But if you’re an executive, a preacher, a teacher,
or a musician, your coach has to be in the room to provide any
meaningful feedback. They need to see how you’re standing, hear the
inflections in your voice, and sense the response of the people around
you. Too much of what is called “coaching” is really just untrained
low-cost therapy – listening to you self-report about the way you see how things are going. If you’re a leader, that’s not the perspective you need.