Why Executives Should Consider Being Coached

 

I once listened to a recorded practice session of Andrea Bocelli, the opera singer. At the time, he was not yet a superstar. He had just performed a pop song and they were listening to a recording of it. His manager, acting as his coach, suggested that he do it over.

"What, it's not good enough?" Andrea asked.

"It's perfect," said his coach. "But you can do it better."

And he did.

I learned a valuable lesson from that, and in the 1980s, during the quality improvement movement, Dr. Edwards Demming emphasized that you are either improving or dying. If you stand still, your competition will pass you and eventually you will die. And this is true even what you are currently doing is perfect, as was true of Bocelli's song.

The value of being coached is that the coach will nudge you to always strive for bettering yourself. Successful people don't compare themselves to others. That can be truly intimidating because there will always be someone better than you. So you compare your current performance to your previous level and try always to do better, even if it is only a tiny percentage. 

In his book, The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy shows that compounding magnifies a small effect over time to create a huge impact on total performance.

It is also interesting how seemingly insignificant a coaching intervention can seem, yet the client later tells you how important it was. I made a suggestion to one of my clients 23 years ago that he recently told me gave him the confidence to tackle a job he may not have felt up to otherwise. And he was successful in it.

Much of what we do in a training program is coach the students and I have had the pleasure on several occasions to hear from one of them that something I said had made a big difference in his/her life. This is the big reward that a coach values. And for an executive, if my coaching helps that person perform at a higher level, the impact on employees, customers, and other stakeholders can be huge. That is why I prefer to coach the top tier of an organization--every improvement ripples down through the hierarchy and magnifies the result.

So my suggestion is that you consider being coached. You may already be perfect, but can always do better.