Coaching

When you direct your efforts at preventing problems and building skills,
rather than finding and fixing problems,
your success rate will steadily improve.

Client Profile

The terms coaching and consulting are often confused. Deciding how consulting and coaching differ can help you define what you can demand and should expect from a consultant or coach, and to know if and when you receive the value you want.

When a consultant or coach and a financial advisor understand each other and use agreed definitions, a productive professional<>client relationship can be formed.

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If you like your clients, enjoy selling, make enough money doing it, and know where your next sales will come from, it ain’t broke, so don’t try fixing it. Consulting and coaching aren’t for everyone. Getting a second opinion to make sure you are on track, however, may help if you don’t have a board of directors or someone to report to.

If you don’t like many of your clients, want to make more profits selling, don’t necessarily know where your next sales are coming from, feel a need to upgrade your markets, lack focus, or simply want to explore how to improve the growth pattern of your business for the long haul, then maybe you should consider engaging a consultant or coach to help you grow.

My Chinese professor used to say, “It’s easy, once you know how.” It can be devastating to growth when you don’t.

Coaching is basically tactical—an intervention.

Consulting is essentially strategic.

"Coaching" simply means facilitating the learning process for an individual who is performing a job. Where a job description defines the job, coaching lets the learner know when s/he has hit the target and provides instruction on what can be done better.

The “job” can be swinging a pitching wedge from the rough in golf, making a better speech, parenting a child through a difficult age, conducting an initial interview in financial advisory services. If there is a job that needs doing better, there is probably a coach for it. Coaching has become the preferred learning method because it is up close and personal and obviates learning by the painful hunt, guess and cuss method.

A coach performs a variety of activities: giving direction, evaluating work, giving and receiving feedback. A coach, however, is not the source of all knowledge for the learner. Rather, a coach is a resource who can guide the learner to finding his or her own answers. Self-discovery is the best teacher. It provides the “Aha!” factor in learning. A good coach tries more to get the learner to this point in learning, and tries less to teach. Socrates was well-known for doing this through his guided questioning of students.

Coaching as Intervention

You may have been in financial services 5 years or 35 years; regardless, things in the business have certainly changed since you began and things that affected the way you do business may have changed in your personal life as well; you may be ready to sprint and not know the best direction to go, or you may have to work smarter to conserve energy for non-business issues that have become necessary interruptions in your business routine. Family life can make this very real. In my 30 years’ experience, none of these issues merits a full-blown consultation in marketing or in career counseling, something usually reserved for making a quantum leap (a sea change) and not just stepping off of your current plateau. A short-term intervention—a few one hour sessions with a savvy coach—can often help you achieve the minor breakthrough you need to prosper.

Coaching is always in the context of next time. If every next time a performance is just a little better than this time, then you are improving, always making progress. This is the justification for changing the way you do something, either by tweaking—making an adjustment that changes how you do something—or changing what you do.

Change does not always mean progress, but… progress always means change of some sort. To my way of thinking, a good coach is a change agent: s/he helps you see what is not working so well and what needs to be done differently to make it work better next time.

The Coaching Process

A good coach will first lead you through a series of questions to determine your style, temperament, experiences, habits and distractions. This way, you will be coached from your personal situation as your foundation for progress. Be honest about yourself with your coach. Don’t allow him to make assumptions about you. You don’t want to be merely clay to a coach’s cookie cutter remedy for everything. This beginning point should also include laying out your objectives for this coaching intervention.

The problem you initially think you have may not be the actual problem you need to solve. Most advisors who seek coaching feel that they are at sea in a whirlpool and they cannot see the horizon. They want to regain their perspective. Beginning with an end in mind is key to recover their bearings.

Understand your actual experiences, not just your feelings about them. A good coach will ask you to describe real experiences from the past and as you have them during coaching. S/he will be your Sgt. Friday and caution you to relate “just the facts” before exploring how you feel about them. This often frustrates people who are being coached because their feelings are often first on their mind. Regardless, the technique of first examining behavioral facts will enable you to self-critique and to coach yourself better with every future experience.

Experience was the best teacher. Guided experience is better. Good coaches guide good learning experiences. Good learners learn good self-critiquing techniques as permanent means to continual self-improvement. You don’t have to be sick to get better.

Progress, your fundamental objective, must be measured for two reasons: 1) you will know that you really are making headway and 2) you will see that the coaching is profitable. It’s not rocket science or even difficult to do, but for advisors in financial services, measuring more than just the deposits you make to your checking account is rare. Advisors who see how much profit they forfeit by not knowing about it kick themselves. An adage from carpentry helps drive this point home: Measure twice, cut once. Regularly measure income minus expenses to see profits, and you will surely focus better in your business. Profit is the sole criterion of the enterprise.

A caveat about coaching: Don't expect your coach to coach your personality; expect him to coach your performance. You are not likely to change your values, ideas, hopes, dreams, beliefs, tastes, talents—all the things that make up who and what you are. But behaviors can be changed, and behaviors are what affect job performance.

Behaviors are simply those things a person says or does that others can observe. Examples of behaviors are: facial expression, tone of voice, body posture, gestures (or lack of them), volubility (or lack of it), questions and how you ask them, statements and how you make them, etcetera. Unless a person is dead, s/he is always behaving. My task as a coach is to help advisors use better, more suitable behaviors for performing more effectively…and more profitably.

A good coach will work himself out of the job at hand by solving the issue. If a new issue surfaces, your relationship with your coach is satisfying, and your results are profitable, then there is a renewal of the relationship to tackle a new task. If you find yourself extending a relationship with a coach because you are not making progress, and you need to continue learning the same skill because you aren’t mastering it, ask yourself why and consider changing coaches.