What ideas or reactions does the
word RUTHLESS
concoct for you? It probably evokes
feelings of someone who would trample over you or others to achieve their goal.
So what if I described to you
someone who was "ruthlessly results-oriented"? I recently exchanged tweets with @coachingacademy as follows:
A bit more research and I found
the referenced Fast Company article “Wanna be a player? Get a coach!” written by Claire Tristram in 2006. The actual passage in the article states:
“If coaches have one thing in common, it's that they are ruthlessly
results-oriented”.
I disagree. Completely.
A question of Trust
In coaching, the
basis of a successful coaching relationship is trust. With trust established, a skilled coach can
create the right degrees of tension and challenge to raise awareness and help
facilitate change. Without change there
are no meaningful results. Without results,
coaching has no value. Results come from
trust.
This perhaps defines
what good coaches have in common.
Ruthless means to act in a manner which is cruel, merciless
or hard-hearted, without pity or compassion.
To me this feels like
the antithesis of good coaching. It feels like it could undermine trust. It feels like it could drive a client
to follow the coaches agenda, not the clients own.
A problem from the
past
The article was
written 5 years ago and is after all just one article. There is an increasingly better understanding
of coaching and what good practice looks like, especially when working with
Executives. We’ve moved on right?
Well this is where I have the problem…
Try Googling
"ruthlessly results-oriented” and you initially get 8,330 results! Scroll through them and it comes down to 259
results. Over 40% of these are postings
from the last year all of which seem to reference and endorse this phrase used
in Fast Company magazine 5 years ago.
So what I take from
this is that there are plenty of people out there who still feel that “If
coaches have one thing in common, it's that they are ruthlessly
results-oriented”. Most of these
people seem to be coaches…
Does it matter?
Those who know me
well enough know that I’m passionate about assuring quality practice in both
coaching and mentoring. It’s one of the
reasons I’m involved as a volunteer with the EMCC.
The basis for coaching
is trust. The value of coaching is in
the results we help our clients achieve.
My concern is not
with an article written 5 years ago. My
concern is with the continued use of language which harks back to an era when
some coaches were more interested in their own results rather than their
clients.
So that's my view but how about you? Tell me what you
think...
- How would you feel about a coach who was “ruthlessly
results-oriented”?
- What are your concerns about poor
coaching practice?
