Those who can, coach.

by Anna Springett,
published in 2023

At school, in the ‘80s and ‘90s at least, it was not uncommon to have a teacher who in fact could not teach - the history teacher who sat at his desk and read from the textbook; the maths teacher who stole all joy from the magic of numbers. Many of us may also have a story of a teacher who lives up to the infamous quote from George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Man and Superman’: ‘Those who can, do.  Those who can’t, teach’.

We may know of a truly excellent specialist, maybe a scientist, who simply cannot teach – turning on its head the UK Department of Education’s recruitment campaign of 2008 (‘Those who can, teach’).  People who excel at their profession or trade may NOT be any good at teaching.  The truth is that teaching and imparting knowledge is a specific skill, which is why you can no longer study a subject and go straight to teaching it – you have to study teaching first, to become a teacher of your specialist area.

Being a specialist or expert in a subject area is not enough.

Similarly, in many professions, it is still common for the highly skilled individual to be promoted to a leadership role on the basis of their expertise and years of experience:  The successful engineer who is promoted to running the department, only to micromanage and de-skill others.  Managing and leading people is an entirely different skillset to engineering.

And so, the pattern emerges:  We promote and extend from an area of skill and expertise, remaining surprised when this does not work out as well as we had hoped.  This is an age-old problem that we continue to see across a host of sectors and settings.

(c) 2023 Bethia Erin Rose, 'The Answer', from 'Art & Soul'

Charan, Drotter and Noel deconstruct their view on what’s behind this in their book ‘The Leadership Pipeline, How to Build the Leadership Powered Company’.  Written in 2011, this book remains highly relevant in a range of industries and sectors, articulating clearly the lived experience of many professionals.  We are encouraged to look through the lenses of skills, time allocation, and values:  What skills does the role require, how does time need to be allocated, and what are the values or motivators that will enable success in the role.

Using these three perspectives, we can hypothesise that an applied mathematician, for example, will need well developed numerical reasoning, problem solving skills, and mathematical modelling capabilities (skills); will spend a large proportion (if not most) of their time alone at a computer, investigating and analysing to develop computational models (time allocation); and be motivated by individual achievement and intellectual stimulation, as well as possibly having generally conservative preferences (values).

(c) Bethia Erin Rose, 'Known', from 'Art & Soul'

When we compare this to our mathematics teacher, we can guess that the skills, values, and use of time will differ significantly:  Classroom leadership and communication are likely to be a key subset of the skills required, with further time being spent on lesson planning, marking and parent meetings, all of which suggests that a successful maths teacher is likely to need to get a buzz from imparting knowledge, seeing young people grow and develop and, importantly in this comparison, enjoy working with people.

You might well ask what all of this has to do with coaching.

We know that many people enter the coaching profession from a background of expertise.  They become skilled in a specific area and then pivot into coaching or mentoring from there:  The injured footballer becomes the football coach.  The senior executive adds business mentoring to a portfolio career.  As coaching professionals, we understand the dedication and time it takes to truly develop one’s coaching practice:  Coach-specific training, observed practice and feedback, reflective practice, trial-and-error, supervision, peer support – CPD in all of its forms.  And then we gradually ‘unlearn’ the expert role and embrace coaching as a powerful profession of its own.

Coaching is an art form underpinned by science, and when done well, is described by clients as transformational, magical, ‘jedi-like’:  Skilled coaching can look effortless, ever masterful.

And so, as professionals, we understand that the excellent sports coach has additional, well-honed coaching skills, beyond the skills needed for playing football; that the much-loved teacher excels at enabling learning in their students; and that the highly effective leadership coach is not simply an expert in leadership who shares their knowledge with others.

If we turn our attention to coach-training, we can apply what we know here too:  An excellent coach is not automatically a good trainer; the same logic and truths apply. Similarly, a psychologist is not automatically a good coach.  A coach is not a therapist.  A thought-leader is not a people-developer.  Any one person may well possess many of these skills, but the skill or profession or expertise in itself is unique, and requires time and investment to be developed.

(c) Bethia Erin Rose, 'The Inner Dance', from 'Art & Soul'

Let’s think in terms of a role specification:  What are the skills, knowledge and motivational profile of a coach?  A psychologist?  A thought-leader?  Researcher?  Trainer?  Author?  How is each unique and where are there crossovers?  In the profession of coaching, we have individuals whose unique strengths map onto one or more of these roles or specialisms (where we define strengths as those things you are good at and really enjoy).

You might be a one-to-one coach and author who enjoys and supports reflective practice, or a team coach and therapist, drawing on a love of and skill in holding emergent group spaces.  You might be a specialist coach and researcher, focused on a specific area such as women’s health; or a systemic team coach and group supervisor, with strengths in working within complex systems and settings.

Depending on where your passions lie – what interests you, what you are good at – your ‘cut’ of the coaching profession will be unique to you.  We know that this is true – it is the work we do with other people through coaching after all.  So far, so good:  A gentle exploration of what we probably already know.

So, where’s the challenge for us in all of this?

How often do we encourage each other as coaches to seek out what we excel in and love doing, and to do that awesomely well?  To find our unique gift to the world and go after it with determination and focus?  In truth, we more often tell each other that we can do everything – design the programme, write the book, run the podcast, saying ‘you can do whatever you put your mind to’.  Maybe that’s true – but how much will you love it?  And how much do you care about the end result?

(c) Bethia Erin Rose, 'Sometimes' from 'Art & Soul'

If you are a one-to-one coach who enjoys nothing better than to coach – that is fantastic:  Keep honing your skill.  Keep loving your work.  You may want to consider how to get to do more of what you love – but you do not need to write a book - unless of course this is something you are motivated by and that you have the required skills to bring into fruition.

The risk though, is that you inadvertently end up doing damage to your brand.

If you write that book in order to bring you more one-to-one coaching work, unless your book is genuinely top-notch and marketed to people who are potential coachees or buyers of coaching, at best, this is a lot of work for very little return; at worst and if poorly executed due to you not playing to your strengths, it may not reflect well on you as a coach.

If you are a thought-leader in the coaching profession – perhaps leading the way in research, or developing emergent ‘good practice’ models through years of hands-on experience, consider how best to maintain that space:  Are you an eloquent writer?  A key-note speaker?  How can you best continue to share your knowledge and expertise in the profession?  It is rare for one person to be genuinely strong across all fronts – remember that a successful thought leader may have a diverse team to cover all of these bases.  If they attempt to do it all themselves, the cracks will start to appear.

Back to Bernard Shaw’s quote: ‘Those who can, do.  Those who can’t, teach’.  We might more helpfully reframe this as: ‘Those who can coach, coach.  Those who can teach, teach.  Some can do both. Some can do other combinations.’  Not quite so catchy, and unlikely to become anyone’s marketing campaign, but perhaps more honest and helpful - and more human.

Coming back to the title of Shaw’s play: ‘Man and Superman’, and working with ‘Human and Superhuman’ as a preferred title, we know that each of us individual ‘humans’ is a unique combination of skills, energy, and knowledge. Let that inform how our individual coaching practice shapes up.

As for any notions of ‘Superhuman’, let’s challenge the system that is our coaching profession – which arguably can be somewhat prone to hero worship. What if we instead encouraged each other to be ‘excelling humans, each one bringing their very best to bear on improving the world’; or maybe even ‘good enough humans’, rather than the ‘superhuman’.

Or maybe even good enough humans, rather than the 'superhuman'.

No few influential individuals excel across the whole field. Let’s be brave enough to acknowledge this and make space for the full and diverse range of excellence that exists across our profession. It’s okay to not be good at everything - by sticking to what we each are excellent at, or have the untapped potential to develop into, we leave room for the excellent skills of others to emerge in the spaces around us.

After all, isn’t that what coaching is all about.

(c) 2023 Bethia Erin Rose, From 'It happened here', 'Art & Soul'