You can’t make a donkey drink if it isn’t thirsty
Put another way, you cannot coach someone who does not want to be coached. This is a basic principle common to all coaching professions.
The flip side is interesting: just as starting therapy means you’re halfway there, wanting to be coached and actively taking that step already acknowledges the existence of a problem and signals a willingness to change. All that’s needed then is to channel that willingness and offer the person or organization being coached the challenge they’re seeking so that change can take place.
Corporate Coaching: Culture Is Everything
Let’s first consider the company. Accepting and actively seeking out contradiction in this way requires a healthy dose of humility and reveals a healthy corporate culture. This maturity is a major asset for moving forward. As a coach, I bring a bit of structure to the process and essentially serve as a sparring partner. But whether it’s me or someone else probably doesn’t make much difference: the company would evolve just fine either way.
When it comes to corporate culture, Lean plays a pivotal role in that it fosters a culture of learning—the cornerstone of continuous improvement. This culture is inherently cross-functional because it is focused on customer satisfaction, and customers, for their part, couldn’t care less about any silos within your company. I discussed all of this in a recent article titled “Lean Culture.”
Implicitly, this also means that the companies that would benefit most from coaching will likely never take that step, because their corporate culture won’t allow it. These organizations will eventually die out, and that’s probably for the best—it’s called natural selection.
To be honest, there are also schizophrenic companies—ones that go through the motions of getting coached but really don’t want to change a thing. They exist, but, well, I’m a consultant, not a psychiatrist 🥼🩺
This is to say that you cannot coach a company that does not want to be coached. What about individuals, now?
Coaching Individuals: Here, Too, Culture Is Everything
As a coach, my work takes place at both the collective and individual levels. In particular, code-writing methodologies are individual practices that have a collective impact, because better-structured and better-written code will be easier for someone else to modify. As a result, I spend a good portion of my time in one-on-one sessions with developers.
The issue therefore arises for them in the same way: within the same team, some people are very eager to receive support, while others would frankly prefer to be left alone. Here, too, I don’t force the issue: insisting never leads to anything good. Sometimes, when it has no major impact on the company, this means letting the person get stuck in a dead end, hoping they’ll have the honesty to recognize the problem when the time comes.
In any case, coaching a team creates a sense of emulation: people feel lifted up by the collective desire to progress. Someone who is not at all part of this dynamic will sooner or later end up feeling out of step and draw their own conclusions, sometimes revealing a personal disconnect from the collective culture.