Coaching for Professionals

Dr. Atul Gawande, surgeon and author of the outstanding book The Checklist Manifesto, wrote not too long ago in The New Yorker about coaching.

In it, he does something very difficult: He talks about asking for help, even though he is already an excellent surgeon.

Asking for help as a professional is rarely easy.¹ As professionals, we’re conditioned to appear on top of whatever we do — with those who evaluate us, with our clients (who also evaluate us), with our peers, with those we’re guiding, and ultimately with our own self-image.

Yet coaching can provide pathways to improve beyond where we are today, at the risk of appearing just slightly unsure or of being judged. These risks, of course, are internally perceived risks. They’re not risks to clients, or to the business we’re engaged in. Nonetheless, those internal risks can be quite fearsome, hard to overcome. Dr. Gawande writes eloquently about his own struggles to take on these risks.

When I teach Legal Project Management, I also offer optional coaching sessions as follow-ups to the training. Perhaps half my clients take me up on coaching. Yet I (and they) often find it takes the coaching to truly cement the lessons of training. From Dr. Gawande’s article, citing research on coaching for teachers:

Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time…. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent…. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

The issue, I’ve found, is that even the best classes focus on issues distilled and simplified to make a point. If I want to demonstrate the value of a project charter, for example, I need to show it in a simple, clear context. However, the real world is rarely simple or clear. Coaching helps map the lessons of training to that messy real world.

I’ve now incorporated at least a little bit of coaching into my two-day training sessions, especially when I’m training groups of teams that work together. I’ll coach attendees on, say, project charters in the context of whatever project (matter, file, case) they’re working on at the time, moving from table to table listening to conversations and offering suggestions. It’s a small step, but I’ve discovered even this small step can help turn the lessons into action.

But separate coaching sessions work even better.

Granted, it’s an odd type of coaching, because for the most part neither project management nor lawyering is really something I can observe in situ. So the attendees bring into the coaching session the questions they have, the problems with which they’re wrestling, the team dynamics in play.

Sometimes I can answer their questions directly, especially if they’re questions about technique.² Mostly, though, I try to help them work through the deeper issues via my own questions and by encouraging the team to say out loud what they’re all usually aware of at some level.

And they they head off to put these answers, some self-discovered, some suggested, into practice directly.

Coaching works.

Coaching matters.

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¹Writing about asking for help is even harder.

²I try to not answer directly but rather guiding them to the answer. Sometimes I’m better at this approach than at other times. It’s an area I need to get better at.