Barrier Six: Confidentiality and No Judgment? Sure, Boss!

Lets get right to what you’re thinking. Your role as supervisor or boss presents some inherent problems with coaching that need to be addressed head on.

Given the parameters, guidelines, and principles necessary to be a masterful coach, trust is critical to make the connection. After all, if your employees can’t trust you as their manager, forget even trying to coach them. Coaching requires an elevated level of trust that transcends the superficial trust between employees and management.

And what if some of your salespeople already have a problem with you as their boss and now you’re going to try and coach them? How does that get handled? Do you think any of your employees are going to just come out and say that? Think again.

As a result, this relationship could quickly turn into more of a mentoring rather than a coaching relationship. This is a major reason why companies bring in an expert coach from the outside who doesn’t have any direct ties to the company as a manager would.

Barrier Seven: Anyone Can Manage, Not Everyone Can Coach

“I’m really not cut out to be a coach.” The hard fact is there are managers who want to be coaches, managers who need to be coaches, and managers who shouldn’t be coaches, and probably shouldn’t be managers, either.

Companies that force all managers into a coaching role make a costly assumption that all of their managers would actually make great coaches, just like every college athlete should automatically make the pros. The rules work the same. Desire, attitude, ability, and skill will always be the formula for becoming a successful coach, or athlete. Then there is the mistake of pushing managers to do something they don’t want to do. Managers can easily sabotage their own coaching efforts, and in the end, corporate may learn the wrong lesson: “I guess our internal coaching program didn’t work.”

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