CHAPTER 3

DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES?

People often come and talk to me about business coaching as a career. I take them through the various training options and different possible career paths. As the conversation draws to a close, they sometimes ask, perhaps hesitantly, ‘So, do you think I’ve got what it takes to be a coach?’

If they have the humility to ask the question, then the answer is almost certainly yes.

So this is a very short chapter. It covers, first, the substantive abilities you need to be a coach, then says a little about personality and commercial nous. (I am assuming you have the attitudes – openness to learning, self-awareness and preparedness to be challenged – that would be needed when embarking on any new learning venture, becoming a coach very much included!)

1. Ability

Coaching isn’t difficult. Yes, there are some things to learn and, as you’ll see in Chapter 5, a lot to ‘unlearn’. But most normal business people should be perfectly capable of that.

So, a good coach training selection process should be looking for evidence of three things:

• ●business credibility;
• ●prior demonstrated interest in business coaching;
• ●and being ‘more or less sane’(!)

Business credibility

To be a successful business coach, you need to be credible with businesspeople and at the level at which you are going to coach.

Credibility takes many forms. For most, it just means you’ve been in organisations long enough to earn your stripes: when you walk in the door, your presence is that of someone familiar with the complexities of organisational life. Others get their credibility from outside business: they’re a world-class sports star, for example. Or it might be from their personal qualities, or sheer raw coaching ability: I know a coach who was a head teacher for 11/12ths of his year and took only a few business coaching clients at a time. His coaching (and a particular specialism) was such that he had a devoted following. But outsiders like this still have to convince an HR director, or maybe present to a board, so they still need to know the rules, the jargon, even something as simple as the dress codes.

A decent coach training (see Chapter 4) will, of course, help you develop, clarify and articulate your arguments and ‘pitch’ specifically with regard to coaching, but you still need the basics to build upon.

You’ll notice I’m not saying the business credibility is needed for the substance of the coaching – as you will see in Chapter 5, one of the hallmarks of good coaching is the ability to pull answers out of the client, rather than advising them from any expertise base. It’s to get you in the door and to win clients’ respect so you are able to coach.

All of the above presumes the person is external to the organisation – a freelance coach, perhaps. But the vast majority of coaching is done by people already working within organisations. The credibility point still stands. If you are a leader, you can (maybe) require people to do things from the power base of your title, job role, etc. But if you want to switch to coaching them, then you too need to win a different kind of respect. We talk about that more in later chapters – for the moment, the credibility I’m talking about here is at the entry level of business credibility such that you don’t need to have explained to you, business in general, or the specific sector you are working in, or even the nuances; you know the ropes.

Prior interest in coaching

The science is clear, that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. So, a selection process should also look for evidence that you have been interested and involved in coaching-type activity – often people say to me, ‘I think I’ve been doing this for years, now I want to learn how to do it right!’

So, you may never have called it coaching but, if you have always had an interest in people and what makes them tick, or if people open up and talk to you about things, and/or if you have even taken a few courses out of interest, then you are probably suited.

‘More or less sane’

Perhaps most important of all is that candidates for coach training be ‘more or less sane’: will organisations and coachees be safe in your hands? So, if, for example, you are in the emotional turbulence of a major bereavement or a heart-wrenching divorce, now is probably not the right time for you to be coaching.

It’s more than just a situational issue: to be a business coach, you need the personality trait of reasonable emotional stability. Of course, we all have good days and bad days, but for people in organisations to feel safe that coaches can be trusted with whatever they throw at us, we need to have our feet on the ground. The opposite of this trait is ‘neuroticism’; that is, being emotionally very up and down (it used to be called ‘highly strung’). So, if you are prone to fly off the handle more than most, if you’re forever tense, frustrated or angry, or your highs are sky-high but then you plunge to the depths, then coaching may not be for you.

The danger here is that perfectly normal people, who would make fine coaches, read that previous paragraph and wonder, blimey, am I neurotic? Again, if you’re asking the question, you’re probably not. People who are so emotionally unstable that it would make them unsuited to coaching, know it. They’ve probably also been told many times over the years that they always take things too personally, or overreact. Unless you’ve been aware of a sizeable amount of that in yourself since you were old enough to remember, then you’re not.

Why am I picking on neuroticism, you might ask, when there are so many other aspects of personality that could make people unsuited to becoming a business coach? Because, as the wise and wonderful Adrian Furnham points out, neurotics ‘seem drawn to jobs that are about emotions, such as counselling, the dramatic arts and the visual arts’.¹ So, we’re on the alert.

2. Personality

Of course, the last of the three criteria is more a question of personality than ability.^* But does any other personality variable matter? Are good coaches naturally extraverted, or introverted, or anything else? In other words, is there such a thing as a typical business coach?

^* Yes, I know, there are all sorts of debates on personality, including even whether it exists at all (or is situationally constructed). I’m ducking that question altogether here, just seeing the third criterion at the behavioural level, i.e. the ability to keep your head when all around are losing theirs. For more on personality, see Chapter 7.

Having trained people to coach for over two decades, I think not. In the community of coaches I know best, there are people of every possible hue, range and stripe, from bouncy extraverts to deep introverts, and pretty much every variant on humanity one can think of, including a 50:50 gender balance, and people from six of the seven continents, plus all major creeds and none. The only factor that does seem to be statistically interesting is there are far more people with an MBTI ‘N’ preference than ‘S’ (for explanation of MBTI, see Chapter 6). But Ss can make excellent coaches – and they have a built-in advantage of rarity when looking to define their USP as a coach. For example, one S coach I know has combined her coaching with a detailed specialist knowledge of a particular area of employment law. Her (many) clients do, indeed, want to be coached, not advised, but they also take comfort that she is always right up to date on the relevant background – it differentiates her. But having said that, it does seem to be the case that many more Ns have an interest in coaching, as both consumers and producers.

3. Commercial nous

Another very important part of the question ‘Have I got what it takes?’ relates to your ability to earn a living from coaching.

This is a completely different question from ability and personality. It has already been touched on in Chapter 2, but, to recap, the coaches who are the most successful commercially, who flick off recessions as if they were an irritating midge, who rise to high levels in their organisations, and/or make fortunes as external coaches, are those who know what to do to succeed, and do it in a disciplined and consistent manner, week in week out. If you can do that, more or less, in your current business life, then you should be able to apply it to coaching. It’s tougher in difficult economic conditions, but it’s still perfectly possible. (Chapter 13 should help.)

Right, that reassured you? If you have the three ability components, i.e. business credibility; have been interested in all this for quite a while; and are more or less sane – apart, of course, from when the computer crashes again, that’s perfectly understandable – then you’re fine, let’s move on. In the next chapter, we discuss how you can explore coaching further.