I cringe whenever I hear talk about coaching that derides it as armchair psychology, as just paying someone to blow sunshine up your skirt. I get it: from the outside, coaching can appear no different. After all, those are simply cynical labels for helping a client maintain an empowering context and providing encouragement, respectively, and those are two things I find quite worthy staples of a coaching relationship.
So that’s why, beyond helping with mindset and keeping up motivation, I find it such a boon to the credibility of coaching when it rigorously concerns itself with real world measures, i.e. the numbers of performance, things for which it’s worthwhile to exert effort to “move the needle”. KPI (standing for “Key Performance Indicator”) is the jargon for this is corporate contexts.
By “rigorous”, I mean tracking with consistency, and over a span of time.
The span of time is important and often lost. Casual recall of where things are now and where they were last week is an easy enough bar to clear, but as I explained earlier, the numbers of now and last time do not a trend line make. There’s magic and insight in seeing a progression unfold over the duration of working together.
When the situation of before, during, and after are all known quantities (in the most literal sense!), a coaching relationship is elevated to a far higher standard. Far higher than what? Coaching that rhymes with “We’ll just have conversations and whatever happens, happens.” (which is incidentally quite common, whether or not anyone ever says that out loud in such bald terms). When coaching actually concerns itself with taking regular measurements of meaningful measures, genuine forward progress, or its lack, becomes apparent.
The thing about measuring what matters? It’s inherently a courageous gesture. It dares to shine a light on what is (or is not!) going on, results-wise. If there are a lot of feel-good insights that would normally suffice to keep your client coming back, yet the measures show a lot of going in circles, getting nowhere? That might sour your client on working with you, and that might make tracking real measures seem like scary, unattractive proposition.
(Incidentally, this may be why so few coaches do it.)
But here’s the flip side of that coin: you get to proudly tout upfront that you make the measurement of what matters a cornerstone of the experience. That we’re going to know pretty clearly what sort of real results are happening, and we’re going to know if they’re not. That you are, quite literally, putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to us clients actually realizing value from working with you.
And THAT is an attractive proposition.
