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Are You Coachable?

by Henry Evans

Published in CEO-IQ, Volume 5, Mar-Apr 2004

Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, IBM, and most any "high achievers" combine their natural talent with sound coaching and persistent practice. Good coaching helps you take wherever or whoever you are to the next level. Even the best often need to re-invent themselves to stay ahead.

Writer, speaker and pastor Chuck Swindoll tells a story about famed Dallas Cowboy’s Coach Tom Landry. At a meeting they both attended, Landry was asked how he was able to forge a team out of individuals so that they would win, something he managed to do every year for twenty-nine years. He paused for a moment and then said, "My job is to get men to do what they don’t want to do in order to achieve what they’ve always wanted to achieve." For those men it was the victory of the Super Bowl. What they didn’t want to do was the grueling training it would take to get there. Swindoll concludes,

"Achieving anything takes discipline, clear goals and definable action plans. A good coach will help the team achieve its goal by outlining the exercises and motivating the players to stick to the plan. Facilitating and encouraging discipline in order to win—that’s what coaching is all about."

Having a great coach is only half of the equation. I am sure Landry carefully chose his team members. Similarly, when asked to coach an executive, the first thing I examine is whether this person is "coachable." Rather than waste a company’s money and an executive’s time, I would rather have the dialog right up front. In fact, it is often the first question I ask, "Are you coachable?" And from there we get into an honest and revealing conversation.

So if you are looking for the right coach for you or your executives, be sure to spend equal time determining the readiness and openness of the individual. Take this quick assessment:

The best candidates exhibit the following attributes:

Courage: You are willing to try new approaches that may be outside of your established "comfort zone". Simply put, you must be willing to experience a little pain in order to grow.

Trusting: Your coaching experience is greatly affected by your ability to keep your word as well as your willingness to take a "leap of faith" and trust your coach. Trust is usually exhibited by sharing something that made you feel at risk.

Flexibility: You are not only interested in new ideas, you are actively seeking them. You actively solicit the opinions and ideas of others.

Honest: Without honesty the process fails. You must be willing to present "whole" issues, including your contribution to a challenge so that a coach is working with all the facts.

Desire: Are you a highly successful individual who has hit a rut? Success tends to bring complacency (if it ‘aint broke, why fix it). Good candidates want to find new ways of seeing things. Are you willing to engage your imagination to envision what things might be like, without perceived limitations?

Listening: You are not coming to the coaching table to persuade. You are coming to discover new ways of viewing existing perceptions. This takes a degree of openness that does not come naturally to all leaders. I usually ask clients to repeat back what they heard me say not as a test of the words, but to observe their ability to capture the "essence" of what people say to them.

Accountability: Most leaders are great at holding others accountable. A good coaching candidate WANTS to be accountable to the coach for doing what they have both discovered is best. Will you jump right into discovering why you are not sticking to agreements, or even openly discuss what behaviors you have that may be creating barriers or obstacles for yourself?

The coaching clients that achieve the greatest success want an objective thinking partner to help them reach the next performance level. They leverage their coaching relationship to discover approaches and possibilities that they would not have been likely to discover alone. I see them as business partners, and our business is always good when they are achieving their goals.

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