It's not really about results

As coaches, we have it drilled into us that coaching is about results - help people and organisations set goals and achieve them. We get fixated on getting the result we (and hopefully our clients) want. Particularly in the agile coaching world, we want our clients to "be agile" and we work hard to get to that result. The problem we have is that we are looking for big changes and big results - make this whole organisation (or BU or Team) agile. That requires a lot of change and the one thing we know about change, any change, is that it's hard and slow. Big change is even harder and slower. Big change that not only changes the way people work, but changes the way they think as well, is just about the hardest thing you can imagine doing. Especially at any sort of scale.

So we are often looking for particular results, but not achieving them. The system is changing but not enough to get us our result. So our instinct is to push harder. Drive the change more to speed up the result. The big problem with that, as we saw last time, is that pressure drives resistance and the harder we push, the harder the system pushes back. By trying harder to achieve our result, we make our result harder to achieve. So what do we do? 

I think we need to rethink our approach as coaches. Coaching isn't about achieving a specific result. It's about reaching goals. Aren't they the same thing? Not necessarily. Imagine you go to a tennis coach and ask them to make sure that you win your next game. That's a specific result. The coach (if they are honest) will tell you that while they can't promise that you will win your next match (after all you may be totally outclassed or have an injury), they can promise that by working with them they can improve your game. Improving your game is the goal. By moving towards that goal, the specific result you want (winning the next match) becomes more likely.

In a coaching context more familiar to most of us, coaching someone to ace their next performance conversation with their boss is a specific result. Working with them to become better at giving and receiving feedback is a goal.

Goals are like journeys. Results are like specific points on that journey. By focussing on the specific points along the way, we miss the importance of the overall journey. If we planned a holiday like that - I want to see this thing and that thing and the other thing - we may, when we set out, find that our things are too far apart to allow us to travel between them, or the route becomes convoluted with lots of doubling back and so on. If, however, we have a goal of having a nice 2 week holiday in Europe (a distant dream in these Covid times), we can plan a journey that takes in some of the things we want to see, and probably leave out some others because they are too far off the route (or not in Europe).

If we focus on the journey, the results will emerge. Focussing on getting better at tennis means that winning matches will become easier - the result emerges from the goal. Learning to give and receive feedback will cause you to ace more performance conversations with your boss. The result emerges from the journey. So for us coaches, we should focus more on the journey and less on the individual places on that journey. They will emerge as we progress.

Rather than striving for a particular result, we should be looking at what journey we can take our client (individual or organisation) on so that the desired result is more likely to happen. Or in other words, results are an emergent property of the system, so our job is to tweak the system into a configuration that makes those results more likely to emerge.

This helps us in a couple of ways. First, by focussing on the journey and tweaking the system into a configuration where results are more likely to emerge, we are less likely to push hard for a particular result and build resistance. It also helps us when we have those awkward progress conversations with our clients. The "Are we getting anywhere?" conversations. If we are focussed on results, we will often have a bunch of misses which looks bad. If we focus on the journey we are taking them on, we can always talk them through where they were, where they are now, and all the places in between. They may not have won that last match but boy their backhand is looking much better, and their ranking in the club championship has climbed 4 places.

If you can talk your client through the journey they are on towards their goal, then point out all the great things that have emerged along the way, that's a really good and positive conversation to be having. Much better than going through a list of results and explaining why you didn't hit them all.

Next time you sit down with a client and have a conversation about where they want to go, ask yourself whether the conversation is about setting goals and embarking on a journey towards the goals, or whether the conversation about getting specific results. Then ask yourself what sort of conversation you would rather have with them.