Coaching and Skills Improvement

by Seth Sinclair

In our recent post on “Expanding Leadership Capacity,” we cited a number of ways in which great coaches help their clients.  One of the most important of these is skills improvement.

Improving a client’s job skills, strictly speaking, is not a function of coaching.  Sometimes, while assessing how he or she can help a client, a coach finds the reason a client is not performing up to capacity is because he or she doesn’t have the skills to do his or her job properly.  In that case, what is called for is not coaching, but training—and training programs are usually thought of as the responsibility of trainers and teachers, not coaches.

Training programs, however, have significant limitations.  For one thing, they don’t fit everyone’s different learning styles.  They don’t take into account the learning goals of each individual, and their lessons are often not applied once the student returns to the workplace.

Coaches can’t substitute for the kinds of best practices and techniques that are learned in training programs.  Instead, they help create new ways of thinking that make coachees aware of what they need to do to move forward, including determining areas in which their skills need to be developed. 

After a coachee receives training in a specific area, the coach and coachee can collaborate to identify pertinent “take-aways”; identify plans for implementing the behaviors and skills that have been learned; and then assess, over time, whether the skills learned in the training are having their intended effect.

Coaches encourage coachees to learn for themselves on a continuous basis.  This, in turn, helps coachees develop better learning skills, and makes them capable of learning, not only from formal training courses, but also from almost any experience they encounter.   According to Herb Stevenson of the Cleveland Consulting group, the more individuals are involved in identifying problems, working out their own solutions, and reviewing results, the more complete and long lasting the learning is. 

In one of Sinclair Associates’ current projects, we are holding group training sessions every month on topics including how to conduct “crucial conversations” (conversations that occur when the stakes are high) and “managing execution.”  To ensure that the lessons of these sessions have been thoroughly understood, we follow up with each participant in subsequent-one-on-one sessions to discuss what the topic means to them—and how they can apply the lessons they are learning in their lives and work.

In the end, coaching is not a substitute for training, but a tool that increases the effectiveness of training, and improves the ability of coachees to implement what they have learned.  Having a good coach can make a significant difference in whether the skills learned in a training program can take root and lead to permanent changes and improvements in skills and performance.