Coaching

Some quick thoughts on a cottage industry

When I was an MBA student the Cox School of Business, I often attended seminars put on by the Business Leadership Center. These were excellent seminars and I learned some really incredible things. But there was one guy, let’s call him “Richard,” who was an executive leadership coach who focused on culture change, and his seminars were the worst. He spoke in buzzwords and platitudes and gave the lamest anecdotes. I asked a few questions during the Q&A which should have had straightforward answers, and this guy just talked himself in circles. I wouldn’t have hired him to coach infants on rattle-shaking. And yet, by all accounts, he was a successful coach who executives would hire to, I guess, coach them. But other than building his own executive coaching business for the past 30 years, it does not appear that Richard has ever really done anything of substance—he’s never been responsible for leading large groups of people.

It seems like everyone and their mother is a leadership coach these days and they are all over LinkedIn. If you ask them what they do, and what their job is as a coach, you’ll get some vague answers like, “I help executives unlock their potential by helping them to identify what behavioral roadblocks are keeping them from achieving their goals.” Da Fuq? No, bro, the answer is that you are, most likely, a salesman with nothing to sell. You’re a charismatic person with no one to lead, so you hang up a shingle as a “coach.” John Gall writes in The Systems Bible that, paraphrasing, the apparent goal of leadership training is to create followers, not leaders. This seems to ring true for leadership coaches.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a mass condemnation of coaches and coaching, only a certain class of coaches. I think anyone who came across someone like Bill Campbell would tell you that having him as an advisor was one of the most profound things that ever happened. If you have a look at his Wikipedia page, you can see all of the tech titans that he coached. But Bill’s background before he became a coach is what qualified him to become the most sought-after coach in Silicon Valley. First, he was an actual coach—he was a football coach for ten years. Then he went into business and became an executive. First at Kodak and then Apple, and then he began his own startup, which he sold to AT&T, then he went to be CEO of Intuit. So, not only was he a coach, he was also really successful in the field in which he was coaching—technology companies. Also, I think I heard on a podcast, though I am not 100% sure, that Bill Campbell did not accept compensation for his coaching.

There are other reasons to hire a coach. If you want to get better at a skill like negotiating, then hiring an expert in negotiations like Chris Voss or Maribeth Kuenzi (who taught me negotiation at SMU), would be an excellent choice.

So this leads me to a very simple question, what qualifies someone to coach others in leadership in a field that they’ve never worked in, at a level that they’ve never led at? I am not saying it can’t be done, it just seems really unlikely that someone is just that good at coaching leadership without having really done it themselves. But when you raise this very intuitive critique of coaching, you will get the most ridiculous responses. One LinkedIn post asserted that horse trainers were never horses, but they still trained horses. This is, of course, an absurd counter-argument.

Other counterarguments, though more reasonable, are still absurd. For example, people will pick a successful coach like Bill Belichick and say, “He never played in the NFL, but he still coaches football players.” Again this is absurd. A football coach has an entirely different function than a leadership coach—they are not both “coaches” in the same sense. A football coach is ultimately responsible for the team and makes decisions during the game. Does a leadership coach make decisions for the organization? No! These types of comparisons are ridiculous at face value.

If you’re so good at leadership, then why aren’t you leading an organization rather than just “coaching” others about how to do it? In Bill Campbell’s case, he was done leading companies and wanted to impart his wisdom and experience to others. He also wasn’t just coaching executives on leadership. He was giving advice on strategy, marketing, processes, etc.

Oftentimes companies will hire leadership coaches to develop executives who are struggling or who are exhibiting counter-productive leadership behaviors. But in those cases, what is usually needed is psychotherapy. As this article in Harvard Business Review points out, when an executive is struggling with deep-rooted psychological problems, a lot of “executive coaching” that isn’t rooted in real psychology can be counter-productive. If a leader is mistreating others then they probably need therapy, not “leadership coaching.”

Moreover, if you are leading an organization, it is your job to teach, coach, and mentor those below you. If one of your subordinate leaders is struggling, you should be the one coaching them! And just like with Chris Voss coaching negotiation, coaching is an actual skill that you can get better at. If you are a leader in an organization and you don’t really have a firm grasp on coaching, then maybe you should get a coach to teach you how to coach.