The Simple Case for Coaching
Foolishly, it has taken my whole life to see the obvious case for coaching: none of us ever had formal training in the skill of working effectively.
Such training basically does not exist.
Show me your high school or college course on how to thrive in a corporate environment.
Show me the workplace that trains you how to work, not only in a task or technical skill.
Likely you cannot.
Everything we know about how to have successful careers we learn through proxies.
Parents, mentors, and managers give us advice and set examples.
Schools and workplaces drive us to conform and we learn “on the job” what it means to work.
Often some of this advice and example is fantastic, and we get by.
Consider though how much we are trained for our functional skills.
We take degrees in engineering or finance.
We often get advanced education in law, medicine, or business administration.
We put in thousands of hours of formal schooling on how to be experts in our discipline.
Isn’t it strange that we get zero education on:
How to thrive in a workplace?
How to navigate politics?
How to ask for a raise?
How to deal with a difficult coworker?
During my career, I migrated more and more to mentoring employees rather than only focusing on our projects.
Next, I left corporate work and began sharing my lessons on various social media.
I started coaching executives.
All of this led me to a simple realization…
Coaching is the formal training in how to have a successful career that none of us get another way.
All the other methods listed here, while they help, come from other self-taught individuals.
It simply makes sense to get professional training in something as vital as how to best succeed in your workplace and in your career.
From a skills perspective, coaches can help your skills in communication, collaboration, influence, prioritization, decision-making, and more.
Coaches help you understand difficult colleagues, excel under a tough boss, position yourself for promotion, work through unpleasant feedback, and with moving on successfully to another job or even a new type of work if necessary.
We believe in sports coaches, personal trainers, life coaches, therapists, and a long list of other professionals.
We seek years of education and pursue lifelong learning.
We spend more time at work than any other single waking activity.
Most people will work for more than 40 years.
We need to be successful at work to support our families and feel fulfilled.
Imagine what being just a bit better at the skill of working, starting right now, can do for the rest of your life. Better relations with your boss and coworkers. More pay. Better assignments. Earlier retirement.
Even a small change will have an enormous impact over 40 years.
This is the simple case for coaching.
A little training from someone who has learned things the hard way can improve your whole future career.
Scaling Coaching via Online Courses
My focus is on helping people reach the next level in their careers.
I work with clients at Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, as well as customers in banking, consumer goods, and other industries.
I provide personal, private, and custom career advice to clients worldwide.
With that said. I am often overbooked for coaching.
As a result, I have created a number of online courses covering the most common questions clients ask me, including how to break through to become a true executive, managing up successfully, leadership networking, leadership resumes that get results, and more.
Click here to find my courses.
Audience Insights
I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience, including:
Managers who can coach their team are ideal, but there are three problems, most managers are:
Not formally taught about career management themselves.
Not taught about personnel management (different skill).
Not taught how to effectively coach (different from management).
Well-intentioned, kind managers struggle with career and personnel management, thus leaving little time for coaching.
Engage your manager about hiring a coach from the perspective of “outsourcing” that part of their job. It becomes a win-win. Remember, in addition to their “manager hat” your manager also has to wear the “decision-maker hat, delivering resources hat, managing up hat, being a direct report themselves hat, resource manager hat, and more.” There are a lot of hats to wear.
Hiring a coach for new first-time managers is critical so that their team does not become the “guinea pig / on the job training” which may lead to churn (for both the team and the new manager).
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Level Up is a newsletter from former Amazon Vice President Ethan Evans that breaks down how he succeeded and how you can get to the next level.