Some Office Coaches Whitewash Miseries with Sunny Platitudes
Whenever Tate Volino attended a company-mandated meeting with a
business coach, he had a hard time getting past personality quirks that drove
him nuts.
There was one sales coach who gestured constantly, making her
charm bracelet jangle so much her clients thought a dog on a leash was in the
room. Then there was the business-etiquette coach who used the word
"vignette" so much that Mr. Volino and his colleagues started
inserting it into their everyday speech, like saying over lunch, "Please pass
the vignette."
Mr. Volino admits he carries a larger suspicion of coaches.
"My main issue with many of these people is their level of real-world
experience," he says, noting that many have no idea of the industry or
position of their clients. "I always wonder how well these people would
actually do if they were to do my job, instead of just telling me how to do it
better."
You can get a coach for just about anything in the business world
-- executive coaches, career coaches, strategic-business coaches, performance
coaches, even success coaches -- who can presumably set straight those of us
who have inadvertently coached ourselves into failure.
There are as many people calling themselves coaches today as there
are actors waiting tables. Their backgrounds vary: former top executives,
midlevel managers, M.B.A.s and just good "people persons" looking for
a good revenue stream. Some coach-training schools advocate that people start
calling themselves coaches right after their first class.
The trouble is, not all coaches are winners, despite their often
unshakable winning attitude. Their you-betcha positivism may be a good slap in
the face of knee-jerk bellyachers, but often it just boils down to simple
slogans and pat answers. The answering machine message of one coach concludes:
"Do choose to have a great self-esteem day!"
Earlier this year, a coach visited Ann Garcia's biotech
recruitment company to talk about how he recruited contract engineers during
the dot-com boom. In eight hours, he coached the obvious ("Make sure you
hire qualified people"), dropped names, used bad speaking habits
("Umm"), hitched up his pants for dramatic effect and winked at women
who asked questions.
By the end of the day, the attendees were making Bingo cards with
all those traits and trying to get him to commit all his offenses. "You
started hearing 'Bingo!' from a trainee after every few sentences," says
Ms. Garcia.
Work situations can be so serious that the players need
psychotherapy -- and all they are getting are pep rallies, says Harry Levinson,
a former Harvard professor and the retired founder of the Levinson Institute,
which coaches executives based on organizational psychology, or the study of
behavior within companies.
It's also wrong to think every problem has a solution, he adds. A
very meticulous person and one who manages a subordinate slob aren't likely to
ever get along, he says. "Very little by the way of coaching is going to
do anything to help them," he says.
But it's easy to see the appeal of coaching over the slog of
therapy. Sandy Vilas, chief executive of CoachInc.com, which operates Coach U,
one of the largest coach-training organizations, says the demand for coaching
has skyrocketed. "People are tired of waiting 10 or 20 years," he
says. "We're not interested in why you got to be the way you are."
Peter DiGiammarino, chairman and chief executive of a software
company and regular coaching consumer for himself and his employees, says he
has been a big beneficiary of coaching. But caveat emptor: "I don't like
to hear anybody say that problems are fixed. It's like a marriage -- you're
never done making it better."
The coaching industry, sensitive to the claims that qualifications
aren't necessary, has implemented standards through the International Coaching
Federation, which certifies various levels of coaches based on their training
and experience, and sets out ethical standards, such as client privacy.
(Curiously, the first tenet requires that coaches refrain from anything
"that may negatively impact the public's understanding or acceptance of
coaching as a profession.")
Still, some clients swear by them. They say coaches help them sort
out their goals, reinforce their focus and clear the clutter, in coaching
parlance, that gets in their way. But in some cases, a big part of coaching is
providing what an interested spouse or barfly may once have done for burdened
employees: listening and caring. It's a valuable sounding board, but their
sympathetic ear has the remedial effect of a placebo.
"It took me coaching awhile to fully grasp the power of what
I'm about to tell you," says business coach Nancy Dana. "The greatest
power in coaching is the person coached being fully heard for the first time in
his or her life."
Some just aren't cut out for that kind of intensity. A few years
ago after he was laid off from a hospital, Jason Weber threw in the clipboard
after taking three years of coaching classes by phone. "There are
individuals who believe they're worth every dollar and they have clients who
won't tell you differently," says Mr. Weber. But, "I couldn't buy
what I was selling."
Email your comments to jared.sandberg@wsj.com.
Article
from CareerJournal.com – September 2005