When not to engage in coaching

This is an image of Lana Wookf. She is sitting, looking into camera. She is wearing black glasses and a brown and black batik-patterned shirt. She is holding a book.

My values are important to me and are the scaffolding of my coaching practice. Our values represent the person, co-worker, manager, or employee we want to be and what we want to stand for. Like a compass, values direct us toward the behaviours, actions and practices that reflect the type of practice we aim to hone.

As someone building a coaching practice, meeting (online or in person) is to decide if our coaching expectations are aligned. My main focus is to create and maintain practical behavioural change — to help you and your organisation become who and what you want to be — a kickass participatory development practitioner. As a professional coach, I am the first to tout the benefits of coaching. I have seen the positive impact of my coaching on international development practitioners, the people they manage, and their organisations. I have also personally benefited from being on the receiving end of coaching.

Yet coaching is no silver bullet. It is not always the correct answer to any question about building capability, skills, expertise or management practices.

Here are three situations in which, through my experience as a coach, I realised that coaching is a bad idea.

1. Lack of specific skills or knowledge. If you think that you need coaching, ask yourself why. If the issue concerns a lack of knowledge, skills or ability in a certain area, you may be after training, not coaching. My asking open-ended questions about Excel Macros is not going to be very effective for you reaching your skill building goals. Trying to coach someone around a skill they lack is an exercise in frustration for everyone involved.
2. Lack of buy-in. Coaching is based on trust and an openness to reflecting on one’s values, goals, and actions. Coaching won’t be successful if there are unmet and unrealistic expectations that one coaching conversation will achieve great things in one session. We need to develop a collaborative agreement and expectations and have accountability towards each other, knowing that the coaching relationship will last for a minimum of four months and often longer.
3. You are unable to allocate time. To set yourself up for coaching success, you need to allocate time. Time for regular coaching sessions. Time for preparation, making a cup of tea, collecting your thoughts, and having any activities you would undertake prepared for the coaching session. The time between coaching sessions to action any items you identified in the coaching session that you need to do to reach your practice goals. You do not do coaching while your mind is on the report due at the end of the day. Coaching can’t be cancelled at the last minute because you have other things to do. It needs to be prioritised, and a time negotiated allows you to be present and open to the coaching process.

Of course, coaching is not always a bad idea — there are many situations in which coaching is a great approach to take and yields terrific results. So, if you are interested in coaching and think it may be the right step for you to identify your values, set work-related goals, sharpen existing skills, brainstorm solutions to your social inclusion challenges, then send me an email, and we can set up a call to see if our expectations are aligned.

To learn more about my coaching offerings, check out the Community Powered Responses Coaching webpage.

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