5 Reasons Nobody Wants Your Coaching
Do you ever want to throw your arms up in frustration because nobody will listen to you? No, I’m not referring to your children. I’m talking about the professionals you try to coach, manage and lead every day.
Try as you may, professionals young and old, experienced and inexperienced, Gen X’rs, Gen Y’s and boomers alike won’t accept your coaching. No, it’s quite the opposite. They avoid you like the plague. They need the coaching and ironically, may even want coaching but your offers to help fall upon deaf ears.
"Why won’t they listen?" you lament. I have so much to offer!
My guess is that your not just part of the problem, but the actual root of the problem. It's not your wisdom - it's YOU.
I suggest you take a good, hard look in the mirror.
Note: Not the imaginary mirror, the real mirror. The one whose reflection is YOU, not someone else. Not the person you want to be but the person your professionals see when they look at you. When I look in the mirror, my wife wishes Jon Bon Jovi was in the reflection, but that’s a story for another day!
Here a 5 possible reasons why nobody wants coaching from you.
You move way too quickly. Always running around like a chicken with your head cut-off. Stress radiates off you like sleaze radiates from the Kardashian sisters. (Sorry, not a fan…) As a result, it’s seems better to get out of the way, than to stand in the eye of the storm.
Is there a solution? Yes, carve out a set time each day or week to see your professionals and lighten up a bit. By the way, the "I’m really busy act" is getting old. Everybody’s busy and if they’re not, they spend wishing they were busier – and that can take up a lot of time.
- You’ll penalize them for being unsure
When they come to you, you mock them or roll your eyes or act annoyed. How dare they not be trained or experienced enough to handle this trivial matter. To be sure, not everyone is a rock star. There are those who need to find their pot of gold at the end of someone else’s rainbow but if you want people to continue to seek your guidance, just say, "good question" and help them find the appropriate answer.
Correction: you’ll listen for 2 or 3 minutes then dive in head first with a solution. Most likely, since you didn’t hear them out you have absolutely no clue what they want. They may want guidance but there’s a good chance they don’t want a solution from you. Most of the professionals I coach merely want a sounding board, not a chalkboard. Sure, it’s fun to play the role of professor emeritus, but that’s not always called for.
Instead, hear your professionals out and say, "Is there anything else I should know about the situation", before offering your esteemed guidance.
What if your people don’t trust you and find you to be a blabbermouth; or worse, the curator of the office grapevine. Could it be that you’ve burned them before? How about the time you turned a simple question into an ad-hoc performance review and your professional left fighting back tears.
Maybe they think you hide behind email too much or they find you less than open, candid and transparent. Perhaps you don’t follow through like you said you would. All this leads to a credibility problem. Or the feeling that you can’t be counted on.
Don’t bother having an open-door policy. Your office is the last place people will go for help.
I hope you’re not the kind of leader that thinks of respect as a 4-letter word. Think about it this way. The more respect you heap on your professionals, the more likely they will want to accept your coaching. The inverse: with less respect, fewer opportunities to coach.
Yes, being a weenie sabotages all your efforts.
Throwing your people under the bus or taking credit for their ideas. Using phrases like, "I’ll do the talking." Or, "we got a problem and I need to talk to you NOW!" Or, "you’re on my radar," or "It sucks to be you!" That behavior just isn’t kosher in my book. Nobody wants to be grilled that way.
What’s that? "They don’t have to like you, they just have to respect you!"
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The reality is that if they don’t like you, they’re not going to come to you for coaching and just that one reason alone will harm your efforts more than any of the other reasons combined. It doesn’t have to be the mutual admiration society, just an atmosphere where your people feel comfortable around you and in conversation with you.
That’s just the way it works.
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