By Hazri Hood

Coaching is not for everyone. As a matter of fact, for some, being asked to get coaching may feel more like being told to get treated for an illness. If they had the choice, they would probably avoid it. Why?

Coaching, mentoring and counselling are oftentimes confused between one and the other. In Malaysia, counselling services have long been established in schools and learning as well as social institutions as a way of providing emotional support to students. The connotation for counselling is that you needed “extra help” to get through. Counselling intervention also usually occurs as a reactive action a result of an undesirable behaviour or a measure to avoid disciplinary action. Coaching (and mentoring) is different as it is meant to heighten performance. Coaching intervention is arranged to elevate the performance of an individual so that s/he can perform his task better. If you could imagine a young junior sprinter who shows potential to beat his time, what intervention would you offer – coaching or counselling? The example just shared refers to sports coaching, just to illustrate the point on how to differentiate coaching and counselling.

While we are probably more familiar with sports coaching, there are also business coaching and life coaching. Coaching is defined as a “thought provoking” and “creative process” between a coach and an individual, that results in “inspired actionable” steps. The words captured in captions are powerful elements that need to be achieved in each meaningful coaching event. Let us try to break them down so they make sense. Coaches use powerful questions as a tool to facilitate the coaching process. Thought provoking questions can help reset our present thinking and help us push to another level of thought. But this can only be done with the right pre-conditions. Any self-respecting coach will gain permission and establish trust from the coachee to embark on the coaching process. A good coach will focus on connecting. Once there is connection, the coachee may feel as if “two minds are working as one” in coming up with actionable options for the coachee. This is where the coach uses his skill to help the coachee come up with creative ways to offer possible solutions to an issue.

What are the challenges to coaching?

Remember what defines coaching – thought provoking and creative process. Coaches have the task ahead of them to make sure that they are prepared to deliver expected outcomes of the session. Good coaches would ask themselves, “how do I make this session beneficial for the coachee?” and prepare accordingly carefully. While the coach will need to use all in his skills to achieve this, the judge of the coaching value rests only with the coachee and the coachee alone. If the coachee doesn’t feel stimulated, moved or motivated over the course of the coaching intervention, there will be no outcome. A coach that does not help get the targeted outcomes for his coachee may not have claim to the job any longer. Think about it, why would you continue to have a coach in this situation?

I did not explain how mentoring is different to coaching earlier but to round it off, let us briefly go into the differences between the two. A mentor usually is a more senior person who uses his knowledge and experience to help guide a younger person to learn the ropes and move up the organisation at an accelerated pace. With the help of the mentor, the apprentice will have the benefit of foresight and experience. A mentor-mentee relationship may develop an emotional bond whereby the mentee will benefit from having someone who takes an interest in the long-term development of his/her career. There are great mentor-mentee relationships that we know of, for example, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. Organisations set up mentoring programmes to provide support for potential young leaders to get guidance as they navigate the workplace and work themselves up the corporate ladder, though too often it is assumed that because you assume a senior post you are qualified to mentor someone lower down the ranks. However, the landscape for mentoring is evolving, with the changing needs.

Now, I have had the good fortune to have learned a lot from people whom I have worked for – I’ve worked directly under three CEOs who took me under their wings. They all took the trouble to mentor me and I have learned a great deal from them especially on what it means to be a leader. But the ones who coached left me with the best leadership learnings. This gave me the confidence and what I needed to come into my own. My leader-coaches gave me the latitude to choose my own path through empowerment. Why this worked best is because I learn much more from experience than through other means. To support this, studies have shown that the most significant learnings result from on the job training or from work experiences.

A mentor who is trained as a coach can use coaching techniques to help the mentee break through new grounds, not confined only by the wisdom of the mentor. This would inevitably be an added dimension to any mentor-mentee relationship. In this rapidly changing day and age, the pace of change in the workplace today compared to 10 years ago is like night and day. Knowledge does not rest solely with the wise anymore. Billions bits of new information flow everyday, through the internet in particular, making it virtually impossible for us to cope with it. What we may have known 1 year or 1 week or 1 day ago may not necessarily be applicable today. Putting this into perspective, the traditional mentoring method, as we know it, of imparting wisdom to the young wide-eyed apprentice, may just be a thing of the past. So what is the greatest value of a coach? A good coach will never ask you to follow in his footsteps. In a coaching relationship you will not be bound by the coach’s worldview, unlike what you may experience in a traditional mentoring relationship. The human potential is boundless, and a good coach is trained to help you achieve your leadership destiny sooner than you ever imagined. At Winning Minds, we aim to catalyse change through being part of your leadership journey. The well being of the ummah depends on our effort towards making it happen. InsyaAllah.