“We’re all individual people in this business (coaching) and we need some way to connect with each other.

We live in a networking society.

What I decided to do was to be an infomediary within the coaching industry-- that is, taking information that I’ve gotten out there that I think might be valuable to other coaches and put it in a weekly newsletter.

“What I’ve found is that it’s a peer-to-peer network, so the power is in the readership, not in a certain organization. When an organization provides a newsletter, it will only contain information interesting to the organization, not the coaches. I thought we needed a way to connect and answer certain questions. Something where you can talk directly with other coaches about issues of interest without having a company in mind.”

We spoke to John as part of our ongoing look at coaching as a strategy for business development. Throughout our discussions with leaders in the field, we have continued to examine the difficulties many of us in the industry have simply defining what we do.

“Even though I am a recovering management consultant, most people still categorize what I do within the management consulting profession---because they can't visualize what ‘coaching’ is or where it fits within their world. Traditional advisors will do the specialized work (a lawyer/banker/stock broker/accountant) for you by providing another pair of hands. When you need to learn how to do the work yourself, hire a mentor”

John posed the question “How do you define what you do?” to the subscribers of his Coach2Coach Newsletter, and here are some of the responses:

The simplest way I can put it is that all top sports people have a coach, so there's something they know that we can learn from. Coaching assists people to go for their dreams or big goals, and to stay at the top of their game. - Carly Anderson, www.CarlyAnderson.com

I find that more often than not I need to talk in terms of outcomes or eyes glaze over....I generally try to find ways to describe process in outcomes language. - Lynda Ronie LMR8855@aol.com

When asked the question by someone who has no knowledge of this arena I compare a life coach to a personal trainer for all areas of life, someone who works with an individual to review important areas of their life, enabling them to set goals of what they want to achieve in these areas and to establish an action plan of how to attain these goals. - Sarah Pope, Sarah@the-coaching-academy.com

“Coaching,” John tells us, “is about the person being coached. You need to know about who the person is and where they’re coming from to be able to answer the question ‘what do you do?’ Many people answer this question solely from a marketing standpoint-- ‘how am I going to market what it is I do in order to get business?’ Others answer it from a developmental standpoint. The answer is: it depends.”

“People come to my door when they have a burning issue that they’re not certain how to solve. They recognize that the self-help books don’t work, and they really don’t want to see a therapist, but they know they’ve got to be able to talk to somebody to figure out how to go forward.”

In decades past, most people went to work for a company and stayed there for a large part -- if not the entirety-- of their career. In this paradigm, it was common that young workers found mentors in their more senior co-workers or managers, and these mentoring relationships developed over time as the young worker developed his or her career. But in today’s world, that kind of career path is almost unheard of. People will often work eight to ten jobs over the course of their careers. As a result, those mentoring relationships are harder to come by.

John sees coaching as the logical outgrowth of this new paradigm: Today’s coaches often fill the void left by yesterday’s mentors. Often, parallels are drawn between coaching and business consulting. Having done both, John explains the vital difference:

“When I came in to work with an organization as a consultant, I was hired to work on a specific problem. I was proactive in solving the problem and moving the venture forward, and then I disengaged. But what I found was that I had all the knowledge, and when I left, nobody knew why the problem occurred in the first place, and it reoccurred. What I do now is help people solve their own problems.”

Many perspective clients and companies aren’t even sure how or where to begin their search for a coach. John thinks a Google search for "leadership coaching" or "leadership coach" is a great place to start.

“To evaluate the top results of your Google search, call these coaches and have a telephone conversation to get a feel if you can work well together.

Before the phone call, you might want to check out your short list by making a Google search of the coach's name (like ‘john agno’) and reading some of the search result articles, websites, bios, and association membership descriptions to get a better idea of the capability of the coach.”

But once a coach is engaged, they may discover a serious stumbling block: the generation gap. This is particularly true when they are helping a small or family-owned business transition their leadership from one generation to the next. The current ownership generation-- those who are preparing to retire-- have very different perspectives on the roles of work and play.

“I think that many people of our generation think business is business, and immersed themselves in business. But I’m seeing in my children a generation that is much more actively involved with their families and personal lives, and they take a different approach to business.

I have one son who works for a large software company, and he really looks at life balance, how much he’s going to work versus how much time he will have for other aspects of his life. This generation has an entirely different paradigm of how business and the rest of life should work.”

Learning how to reconcile these generational differences is a crucial skill for coaches. There are over three million small, privately-held companies that have been around for three generations. The vast majority are controlled by people who are nearing retirement age, and the next generation will soon be stepping up. Knowing how to balance these disparate perceptions of ‘work’ and ‘career’ is exactly the kind of value coaching can bring into the equation.

But that’s a very tricky proposition.

“It’s hard for people to let go of their dream, of their ‘baby’ which they gave birth to and grew, and they want to maintain some kind of control over that. It would be ideal for the older generation to bring in a coach to work with the next generation, but the son or daughter may be very apprehensive of bringing in someone of dad’s choosing to help them with their life.

“I’ve had so many parents come to me and say ‘Can you come and coach my son or daughter,’ and most of the time, I never even talked with the person who was supposed to be coached. Although the parent recognized that they needed coaching, the son or daughter didn’t.”

For these reasons, it is important to emphasize that the role of the coach is not to coach “Junior,” but rather to coach or mentor the organization with the objective that the business and the individuals both end up where they want to go.

Alternately, the senior generation might not see the value of coaching, or may think that it is too “touchy-feely” or too vague for comfort. Helping this generation understand both the methods and goals of coaching will be imperative if the industry hopes to make any inroads.

“Let’s take the example of a man running a second-generation family business. He is very careful about where he spends his dollars. If he thinks his people need training, he may opt for the training, but he certainly wouldn’t want to pay for mentoring or coaching of these folks because coaching is not very specific. That’s where the problem is. I don’t think it’s related to the ability of the coaches, it’s that people don’t know what they’ll be getting in a coaching scenario.

“They’re willing to pay for knowledge transfer, but the self-awareness stuff, the mentoring… they’re not there yet. They’re very comfortable handling the day- to-day stuff of management: “Give me the decision and I’ll make it for you.” But the pitfall of that is that it ties them to the organization, and they haven’t been able to develop the next generation.”

Currently, there are 3 million small or family business owners, and 60% of them will be retiring from, selling, or transitioning their businesses. The next generation of managers, successors, and employees has a different outlook than the older generation. Coaches are ideally situated to bring these two groups together. But how will that happen? John feels that a paradigm shift is paramount.

“The older generation has to recognize that perhaps a middleman is required to make the shift to the next generation. We have to appeal to their desire to keep the business in the family. They probably recognize this as a logical way to pass on capital to the next generation, but to do that, they have to spend some developmental cash today on bringing the future leaders of the company up to speed.

But even the basic logistics of coaching may be discomfiting to this generation. For example, the majority of today’s coaching takes place on the phone. How will seniors, many of whom are used to conducting business face to face, respond to these techniques?

“They’re going to say ‘You want me to throw my money at someone talking over the phone? And you think that’s going to change things?’ That’s their paradigm.

“It’s hard, because the older generation feels that the person they’re working with needs to be there, that they need to be able to watch what he’s doing. But the reason this kind of coaching works is because it’s like having a private business seminar every week over the phone. You can’t pay for that kind of talent by having them present, because they’d have to charge you for the whole day when they’re only going to be talking with you for an hour. I’ve coached one client for six years and we’ve never met face to face.”

The trick to success, if indeed there is one, appears to lie in articulating our services in a way that the older generation can see their value, and articulating our delivery of those services in a way that the younger generation identifies as effective. But even success has its pitfalls:

“I think what we do as coaches is to help people to develop their capacity for self-coaching, so we eventually become obsolete.”

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