At an event this past week, I sat in on a discussion of coaching. Asking folks what coaching was, there were lots of responses about ‘establishing rapport’, ‘asking questions’, etc. I admit I was a wee bit curious amongst all this, thinking about specifics. Which prompted some reflections. My question is about whether there can be domain-independent coaching.
To start, I was thinking about how to develop people just after a learning ‘event’ or experience. They’ve been developed to a certain level, and then we’d like to continue their development. To do so, I thought feedback would be useful, and specifically tying the learning to any relevant task, and providing feedback to fine-tune their performance. Specifically, this requires knowing the domain they’re learning about, observing their performance (in some way), and identifying ways in which they went right, or wrong. That, in my mind, requires specific knowledge about how the mental models play out in context. This, for example, is what we see in sports coaching.
As context, I remember talking to a very smart individual who runs a business that does coaching as a service, at scale. To do this, they have to have folks who know coaching, but pragmatically can’t necessarily know the domain. I was curious how this could work, but empirically it does. Coupled with the responses of folks around the table, I had to reconcile my specifics with a more general approach. How can this work?
Of course, I started thinking about the trajectory of learners. They start as novices in any particular domain, then proceed to become practitioners, and can become experts. As they progress, they need less specifics. If you look at situated leadership as a model, you go from providing direction and support, to eventually removing the (domain-specific) direction, then the support, as they become capable. Thus, coaching can move to asking about how they’re feeling about it, and to apply their own knowledge to the situation. That is, you can start asking about the process and their thoughts rather than focusing on specifics.
Of course, to me, if you apply the domain-independent coaching at the wrong time, you can delay (or extinguish) their development. On the other hand, continuing with micromanaging performance can be similarly restricting. So, I reckon you can shift to domain-independent coaching, after you have developed a minimum viable level of capability. That’s my reconciliation; what’re your thoughts?
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