The coach is a partner. The six traits of a successful partner coach.
When I pursued my ambitions alone, sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. When I worked with a coach, I was always successful.
I have always tended to do everything I set out to do on my own, to work solely on my development, and pursue my professional ambitions myself. Only the fact that some projects necessarily involved working with someone else forced me to turn to professionals in several fields. So I know on my own (as a bank manager, training director, and then entrepreneur) what it’s like to be alone and accompanied.
The loneliness of performance goes up to a point, and then it rolls down.
Many directors who are my coaching clients have discovered the same thing. They often work with me because the employer-sponsor company “asks” them to. From the beginning of our partnership, their preference for solitude performance and striving is evident to me; they prefer to learn on their own, fail on their own, be successful by themselves.
I am amazed by the mentality of Simona Halep. At the age of 30, when a tennis player can retire from sports in peace, she hired a new coach, one of the first in the world (Patrick Mouratoglou), to accompany her in her ambitions.
I wrote about the loneliness of performance before, studied it a lot, and practiced it. In addition, I have de-structured it alonside several top executives. We discovered together that it is not the only type of performance!
There is performance in solitude until a moment, and it will never disappear from a person’s life. But there are also barriers (psychological, most of the time) in front of which you stop and discover that you need a professional partner to overcome them.
Joseph Campbell’s mono-myth (hero myth) conveys just that: an essential step is to accompany the hero with a kind of partner — mentor, coach, advisor, counselor — who helps him move on.
What is the role of the partner?
1. Not to become the hero’s friend, stay out of his problems and goals.
Recently, a client invited me to his house. I refused. I think there is a kind of professional confidence which is enough for performers to perform better. I believe there is a kind of trust that does not help performance — for example a friendship that interferes with a professional contract.
To keep the boundaries between roles, I need to know my limits, have clear contracts with each client, define from the beginning what is and what will not be coaching, what is allowed and what is not, who is and what the client wants as much as who I am and what I want.
2. To understand people, not their “tasks,” to help the person, not to solve their problem.
The more you take care of other people’s business, the less responsible they become. But it is the fault of the one taking care, not of the one receiving the help. I prefer to deepen my excellence in understanding the human motivation for performance, not in leadership, tennis, or any other field of my client. That’s the only way I’ve noticed that I can help.
It took me a long time to learn to withdraw from the client’s problems and goals and only stay on the sidelines. It happened when I realized how much more help I offer in this way.
To be good at people, I have to eliminate the concern for problems, be more attentive to those close and far, become even more empathetic, develop my extrasensorial perceptivity that intuit other person’s emotional state.
3. To supplement the client’s style by giving him the support he lacks, not the support he already has.
The balance between support and challenge is always a delicate one to maintain by the coach: how much encouragement, when, for what, why? How many challenges, when, how, and why?
This balancing is a nuanced skill which gave me many headaches; I entered this profession with the traits of my education: how much have I been supported or challenged at crucial moments in my life?
I need to balance myself, understand how the balance breaks in general, and keep a positive spiritual tension between what is and what can be in my life and that of others.
4. Be minimalist, not to interfere even more than the hero does anyway.
As a coach, I always try to identify the essential leverage that the client can use to get the result he wants quickly and to the maximum.
One achieves performance by lowering one’s potential interference, says Timothy Gallwey, one of the “parents” of the coaching industry. In Simona Halep’s case, interference seems to be cognitive-emotional: perhaps a weaker control of emotional impulses or attention during play. For my clients, these hotspots where they can “turn the world upside down and get performance” are diverse, sometimes hard to spot — but that’s what makes my job so beautiful.
To be minimalist with my clients, I have to be minimalist with myself, take care of only a handful of things, be focused, not to digress, exaggerate or stretch when it is not needed.
5. Believe in the hero and show it, not search for weaknesses.
Everything a man gets, is done with confidence: I lift a cup because I know I’ll be able to reach out, grab the handle, lift it, and bring it closer to my lips. I stand up because I know I can do it, and so on. We do automatic small, already learned gestures because we have solid confidence after thousands of successful attempts.
Sometimes trust comes automatically from within; other times is learned with a partner with whom you make a mistake, get up, evaluate the failure, draw a conclusion, repeat until you succeed.
To believe in my clients, I have to believe in myself and my process, suspend my unbelief, and sometimes mimic the unwavering trust in something.
6. Retire when needed, not ruin the relationship.
Retire timely during coaching conversations, retire from the client’s mind, from his performance, from your role of partner. All these withdrawals push the client to define his area of responsibility and define success on his terms.
I always work to my “detriment” as a businessman because my profession involves identifying and increasing the client’s autonomy: the more successful he is with me, the less he needs my services.
To get out of the client’s way, I have to get out of my way first — my financial needs, my sadness that a partnership is coming to an end, the desire to borrow from the fame I gained with the client, etc.
Partner mentality
How does it look the kind of person who prefers partnerships? How does it look the man who favors the solitude of performance?
By definition, humans are social beings. It is in us a thirst never quenched of being with others. But a partnership is something different from social instinct. The partnership implies a more clearly defined contractual relationship, specific expectations and interests, terms and conditions, rules of the play, objectives, and “equipment.”
From the perspective of a business coaching client, the instinct for partnerships differs from role to role:
- it is very familiar to a business owner;
- it is reasonably familiar to a senior leader in a company if he has been operating for some time at a strategic, less operational level, in which his role is to conclude alliances;
- for an ordinary manager or employee, the instinct for a partner is almost non-existent, as is the motivation for performance, except for those usually considered “talent” or “high-potential.”
When working with these three types of potential clients, to restore the coaching relationship as a partnership, I do first of all (and often at every meeting) a formal presentation of the coach’s role.
What opposes partnerships
On the part of a coach, what can oppose a lucrative partnership with a client may be his inner interferences:
- the savior’s instinct;
- impostor syndrome;
- lack of training;
- psycho-emotional agitation;
- ambiguity about coaching.
From a client’s point of view, what I have noticed is usually opposed to partnerships is:
- ignorance of the role of the coach;
- a lack of a performance mentality or at least growth mindset;
- a mismatch between their values / strengths and the place/function in which they work.
Conclusion
Performance = Potential — Interference
The role of a coaching partnership is to help you see and eliminate your inner interferences. A good partner purged most of his interferences with the help of other partners: psychotherapists, coaches, etc. I do psychotherapy sessions every year to be a cleaner, more professional partner for those who buy my services and for my family. I always learn to improve and be simple, efficient, meaningful, and non-interfering.
