Great Organizations are Coaching Organizations

I sat in a meeting once as the client, not as the consultant.

We brought our ideas to the table. The consultant didn't hand us answers — they asked questions. Real ones, curious ones, the kind that made us explain what we were actually trying to accomplish. By the time we left, we hadn't been told what to do. We'd found it ourselves.

That consulting firm is my employer now. I've been on both sides of that table.

And on both sides, I've seen the same thing. The best organizations aren't full of good coaches. They're built on coaching, from the inside out. They:

• Hire coachable people.

• Coach one another.

• Invite coaching from outside.

• Coach their clients.

Hire coachable people.

Resumes are text on a page. They don't tell you who someone really is.

I'd rather give a candidate a real problem and watch how they take feedback on their solution. There are two ways to lose me: don't solve it, or don't listen when I push back.

I asked a candidate recently how it felt to be challenged. "I loved it," he said. "I learned so much. We only get better with direct feedback."

That's not a candidate. That's someone I want on the team.

Coach one another.

I brought an idea to my team once. It didn't land.

They didn't tell me it wouldn't work. They started asking how I'd gotten there. Somewhere in answering their questions, I found a better option. Their questions got me somewhere their answers never would have.

Coaching doesn't only flow one direction.

Invite coaching from outside.

Most of my career, I led large volunteer teams in a church. I could coach them myself. I did, often.

But the best progress sometimes came from someone outside. I remember one who pushed hard on our stage presence — how the way we carried ourselves changed what the audience received. I didn't like it. Nobody in the room did. But he was right, and we got better because we let someone from outside tell us something we couldn't see from inside it.

Coach their clients.

Which brings me back to that meeting. The one where I was the client.

That posture — curiosity over answers — is the same one we bring to our own clients now. Not because it's a technique. Because it works. People don't need us to have all the answers. They need room to find theirs.

Who's coaching you right now — and who are you willing to let challenge you?