Leading tennis coach Patrick Mouratoglou with his client Serena Williams
When Timothy Gallwey challenged preconceived notions of coaching with his 1974 book The Inner Game of Tennis, his ideas seemed so radical.
While we can look back now and say, “Oh, absolutely… we agree,” many leaders would signal their agreement from a purely intellectual or conceptual standpoint. But when the time came to actually coach, they’d soon forget that there’s an inner and outer game.
The outer game is about technical skills. It’s about fitness. It’s about drills, and practicing moves. It’s about effective nutrition and having the best physios: all of those infrastructural things that support and encourage athletes.
If we look for comparisons within organizations, we can identify what Frederick Herzberg called “hygiene factors,” such as work conditions, pay and benefits: areas we must get right so that people have nothing to complain about, their outer game. The basic ingredients of an environment so people can flourish and succeed, are able to play their inner game.
This inner game, though, is very different. This is where executive coaching really comes into its own – and where the best coaches don’t need to know the minutiae of, say, the steel industry, or financial services.
For they are focusing on the game that’s going on inside your head. The one that relates to confidence and empathy. The one where you discover that your view of reality is yours alone, and that before you judge someone else’s actions, you perhaps have to take careful stock of their motivations.
This is delicate, personal territory, and someone who intends to step on to it must have the appropriate credentials. So it was with great interest that I read business coach Linda Davies Carr’s recent Thrive Global piece, ‘How To Spot A Malibu Barbie Coach.’
Davies Carr points out that low to no barriers to entry are enabling more and more people to call themselves coaches, and writes: “Without a governing body anyone can wake up one morning and decide they want to be a coach, whether or not they have the qualifications to match.”
In the interests of authenticity, Davies Carr provides seven questions a coachee should ask a prospective coach to guarantee that the individual is the real deal. They’re great questions. But you could easily reposition the test as something that would-be coaches – including leaders and managers – could take to gauge their own sincerity and fitness for the task.
For that, you need just three questions:
1. Is this interaction ethical?
Are you coming from an honest, truthful place? If there’s any suggestion that some sort of manipulation is going on, or that you’re trying to get someone to reach your outcomes rather than their own, then that’s not coaching. That’s something else.
2. Do you feel an urge to regale your client with stories from your own experience or offer advice?
If so, it will immediately stop being about them. It’ll be all about you instead. And under those conditions, if you’re talking about yourself or suggesting actions they should take, you’re not coaching.
3. Is there someone who is serving a similar function for you?
If you are genuinely coaching your co-workers and helping them to achieve better outcomes, then who has your back? Remember you need support, too – and coaches who are coached are better at coaching.
If your answers to those questions are respectively Yes, No, and Yes, you can be pretty sure that what you’re doing is authentic coaching. If not, then you’re doing something else.
Keep revisiting those questions and self-diagnosing your motivation, for the good of your clients, team members and, of course, yourself. A strong inner game is the engine that we all rely upon to power us through the outer game’s hours and hours of practice.
