Coaching: a definition
Coaching (التدريب الإداري) is a time limited engagement between an employee and a coach in which the coach works through questions rather than prescriptions, so that the employee reaches, by their own reasoning, a performance or behavioural goal agreed at the start of the engagement.
How a coaching session runs
A coaching session moves through four steps:
- Setting the subject of the session. What the employee wants to leave the session with today.
- Examining the reality. What is actually happening, and on what evidence, as distinct from how the situation appears.
- Generating options. What could be done, with more than one option on the table.
- Committing to a step. What the employee will do before the next session, and by when.
Across all four steps, the coach is responsible for the quality of the question, and the employee is responsible for the answer and for carrying it out. That division of responsibility is what makes a session coaching. A session from which the employee leaves holding the coach’s recommendation was not coaching but consultation.
Coaching and mentoring
Mentoring is an extended relationship in which a person with more experience passes on that experience of career paths and professional judgement. Coaching is a short engagement with a defined goal, in which the coach works through questions and need not have held the role of the person being coached.
What a coach offers therefore depends on the quality of the questions, and having done the employee’s job is not a condition of asking them well.
How coaching differs from a training course
A training course delivers prepared content to a group, and it is the choice when the gap is a piece of knowledge or a skill that instruction can supply. Coaching is individual and has no prepared content, and its subject is what the employee knows but does not apply.
That is why training needs analysis comes before both. It examines whether the gap is a gap in knowledge, which is addressed through instruction, or whether the employee knows what to do and cannot do it for lack of a tool, an authority or time, in which case neither a course nor coaching will help.
When coaching fits and when it does not
- Coaching fits a competent employee who has moved into a broader role whose demands on them have changed.
- Coaching fits where the gap lies in a recurring professional behaviour: handling disagreement, delegating, or communicating a difficult decision.
- Coaching does not fit where the gap is a plain lack of knowledge, because that calls for instruction, not dialogue.
- Coaching does not fit where the cause lies in the role itself, in the tools or in conflicting priorities. Coaching in that situation places on the employee a burden whose source is the organisation.
- Coaching does not fit where the employee does not want it, because what coaching works with is the honest answer.
The two cases in which coaching fits match the subject of coaching: what the employee knows but does not yet apply in the role they now hold. The three cases in which it does not fit place the gap somewhere else, in missing knowledge, in the organisation, or in the employee’s willingness to take part.
Coaching by an internal or an external coach
An external coach stands further from the web of interests inside the organisation, and that makes speaking openly with them less costly for the employee. Against that, an external coach needs time to understand the context of the work.
An internal coach knows the context from the first session, but in return needs published rules that separate what is said in a session from the appraisal process. Without those rules, nothing of value is said in the session.
The two options therefore trade the same two things in opposite directions. The external coach brings distance and has to acquire context. The internal coach brings context and has to be given distance, and the published rules are what provide it, by keeping the session apart from the appraisal.
Whichever option is chosen, a manager who uses a questioning style with their team does not thereby become their coach in the sense of the definition, because the manager still holds the appraisal. Asking questions from that position is a useful management style, not a coaching engagement.
The confusion that undermines coaching
A damaging misuse is to offer coaching as a substitute for a performance improvement plan. Coaching can be one of the forms of support the organisation commits to within a plan, but it cannot take its place. A plan carries a described gap, a required level of performance, a period and reviews, and coaching by its nature carries none of these.
Offering coaching in place of a plan leaves the employee with no statement of what is required of them, and leaves the organisation with no documented record.
Each of those losses follows from something coaching lacks. With no described gap and no required level, the employee cannot tell what would count as meeting the expectation. With no period and no reviews, the organisation has nothing in writing to show what was asked, when it was asked, and what followed.
How to tell whether coaching has worked
Coaching is not measured by the number of sessions, nor by how satisfied the employee is with them. Three things can be measured instead:
- The agreed goal. Whether the goal agreed at the start of the engagement has been reached.
- Observed change. A change noticed and reported by the people who work with the employee every day, which a 360 degree appraisal captures where one is in place.
- The targeted competencies. The level of the specific competencies that the engagement set out to develop.
The number of sessions and the employee’s satisfaction describe the activity of coaching rather than its result, and neither is among the three measures. The first measure rests on the agreement made when the engagement opened, which is why an engagement with no written goal at its start cannot be judged at its end.
This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.
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