“Most coaches aren’t very good.”
I hear this constantly. Founders. Investors. Executives who’ve had a coach. It’s not like they don’t know what I do for work. They volunteer it anyway.
I guess they’re telling me because they think I might be an exception. Maybe they trust me enough to say what they really think. Honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that I hear it a lot.
I haven’t written about coaching here in a while, and it seems like it’s time, because the demand and the need for good help have never been higher. But before you go “oh, another piece about coaching”, give me a minute. I’m not going to sugarcoat the current state of the field or the people it tries to serve. If anything, it might look more like a takedown. But I promise I’ll guide you somewhere more constructive.
Here’s the reality I see: clients don’t know what they’re buying, and coaches don’t know what they’re selling.
Harsh? Sure. But I believe—deeply—that if this weren’t the case, more coaches would be busy delivering results for their clients, and I believe a lot of those clients would be creating better outcomes in the world with fewer unforced errors.
Seems like everything’s unprecedented these days, so I’ll spare you the “we live in unprecedented times” talk. This particular moment in history, in society, in business, and in our concepts of self is unusual. We’re in the transition between two very different ways of living, and there’s plenty of VUCA to go around.
I also won’t claim here that coaching is the cure for all of society’s ills. That’s nonsense. The practice itself is just one way to reach an outcome. There are others. I am going to make a strong case that good coaching can make a lot of this current moment much more comprehensible and the people do their work a lot more successful.
And I’ll start by saying no one really needs a coach.
A coach by any other name…
Coach.
I’ve never loved the word. It doesn’t describe the work. It doesn’t tell you anything about what it’s for, who needs it, what’s different afterward. It’s the professional equivalent of “other duties as assigned”, containing pretty much anything while describing nothing.
I might have a distaste for the word because of a stunningly foul thing my high school basketball coach yelled at me during a game long ago. It’s too coarse to share here, but send me a note and I’ll tell you the story. It didn’t set me up to love coaches.
During my corporate years, I worked with two coaches and didn’t get a damn thing out of it. It was only years later that I recognized that they were both very good, and I was very unready to look at my patterns. That one’s on me.
So I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic when I accidentally became a coach. My path looks very different than a lot of people’s in the field. My first client pressured me into being their coach, then forced me to take money for it, then insisted on making referrals. Six months in, I was working with more people than I would have if I’d been trying.
I resisted at every turn. But a few years in, I realized that I was shifting something for people, something that made them more effective, more successful, more powerful. My presence more than my knowledge was helping in a way I hadn’t been able to appreciate. And that changed the course of my life.
I still don’t love the word. People recognize it, though, so I use it.
What I’d prefer is for us to give the word meaning, to make clearer what it is and what it does. I’d like for people to understand what it’s for and to think of a coach that truly helped them as closer to the norm rather than the exception.
That starts with us coaches and an essential concept from a wise man.
Why no one needs a coach
Clayton Christensen knows why people seek a coach than most coaches do.
His “Jobs to Be Done” theory does a solid job of explaining why anyone makes a choice about anything. The theory posits that people don’t just buy products. They “hire” them to make progress in a specific situation.
“Somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all new products launched into the market don’t succeed financially,” Christensen says. “The reason is they don’t target a job that people are trying to get done.”
If you’re a coach, the job to be done isn’t often going to be what you’re selling. You can offer business coaching or somatic awareness or transformation or whatever, but when that connects with someone, it’s not because of your offer. It’s because people want something they don’t yet have, and they can imagine you helping them get it.
If you’re not addressing a job to be done when you talk to them, there’s no movement.
Nobody has that first conversation to examine their inner life. They’re taking the time because the co-founder fight is spilling over into the team. Or the team isn’t leaning forward. Or the round isn’t closing. Or cash keeps tightening and invoices are going unpaid. The problem they walk in with is intense, external, and already known. They probably already got some feedback about it.
And what do they want that they don’t yet have? A more constructive relationship with their cofounder. Or they want to avoid having the same argument again. Or they want investors to lean in. Or they want customers to value them enough to pay their bills. You know that’s an inside job, but they might not. And if they knew it, they might be doing what you do.
More than that, they want to feel. They want to feel ease, or confidence, or relief. If there’s a path to feeling those things, the rest of the conversation is logistics. They want to know that you can help them get the thing they want but don’t yet have.
When you answer with a process, a framework, a methodology, or a brand of transformational work, the founder hears words that don’t address the thing keeping them up at night. The discussion stays pinned to the symptom they already understand, which means it stays optional.
Put differently, they hear, “yeah, that’s a problem.”
It’s that simple. We talk about what we do, but they’re living inside a situation that’s getting worse. Those two things have yet to meet.
No one really needs a coach. They need the situation to improve (the job to be done). And sometimes the most direct way to get that is with a skilled guide. A coach.
You must first become useful
Useful work requires two kinds of expertise at the same time.
The first is the outer terrain. Fundraising. OKRs. Taking a product to market. The ordinary friction of growing something from nothing into a company that can make payroll on Thursday. Without that, I don’t get a serious look, and I shouldn’t. Someone who’s never been in those rooms can ask good questions and still miss the situation.
The second expertise only shows up in what the person does under pressure.
I worked with a founder whose receivables weren’t being received. Work got delivered and invoices went out. But money didn’t come in.
When he got on the phone he felt smaller than the invoice. He was careful. He left room for the other person to set the terms. If I owed him, I would have paid someone else first. I would have assumed he’d wait. But he couldn’t see that.
(By the way, notice what he wanted. It wasn’t money. It was what the money would make him feel. Respected. Valued. Appreciated. Confident. The job he was trying to get done was feeling those things. Because I didn’t have a rigid process, I could listen for those things and find a lot of ways to get to them.)
We didn’t start with stronger contracts. We started with the way he started that call. He took a slightly different posture. He used a phrase he’d tried before and decided didn’t work. Practice, then another call, then another. A couple months later the money started moving. Clients who’d been drifting began to pay. He sounded like someone who expected the relationship to endure.
I don’t need a special vocabulary for what shifted. Money in the door did the talking.
I’ve seen the same thing with a founder who couldn’t stop triangulating the team. Every decision came back through him, and he called it quality. The team called it waiting.
We didn’t change their meetings. We practiced him staying out of one decision all the way through. Then another. The team started moving, then moving faster. He had more cycles than he’d had in a year.
That combination of depth in the inner terrain and outer context is rare. Familiarity with the business, plus the ability to see the pattern the founder keeps repeating that recreates the outer problem, plus enough patience to stay with the practice until the new way sticks. A lot of people have pieces of this. Former operators often know one or two versions of the movie in real detail and get real quiet when the person in front of them isn’t playing the part. People trained only on the inner work can hear the pattern and still not know what a bridge round does to a cap table or how hiring an assistant creates more work. Coaching starts to matter when both are in play at once.
Non-optional
Most coaches get the reputation for not being very good because that combination is uncommon. Real comprehension of the client’s situation plus the ability to introduce someone to a version of themselves they haven’t met. Maybe enough stubbornness to stay with it until the new capability becomes more than a performance.
The language founders (the people I help) already understand is blunter than the language the coaching industry prefers. To get the chance to help, I need to be fluent and fluid in that language.
Are we going to keep getting the same results with the same operating system?
What becomes possible once an imagined boundary isn’t there?
The highest-value problems feel non-optional. Essential. Anything that gets deprioritized the moment something else catches fire was never real work.
A lot of people think most coaches aren’t very good. But I know a lot of good coaches. And I know a lot of people (like that previous version of me) that don’t see the value yet really need the help. They don’t take action because they don’t trust that a coach can even understand what they do, let alone who they are. And in that mindset, you’re a nuisance and possibly a threat.
You get to lead any way you choose to. If you’re curious about what’s driving the words you’re hearing and hold your frameworks lightly enough, you might get the chance to change someone’s life and work. But to get that job, you have to build trust, and that comes from the person who needs help feeling understood.
That’s also your job.