Coaching Paradox | Hacker News Reader

Coaching Paradox

seths.blog

50 pointsenigmatic0232 comments

We do have coaches in business, we just call them mentors and advisors.

Where are you going to find a business coach that is a retired business leader whose credibility based on past success justifies your making material changes to your behavior based on their influence? Good luck!

There is an industry of "business coaches" but from I've seen, almost as a rule the coaches are not retired business leaders with undeniable accomplishments (because why would such people want to work for you?). It's a market for lemons (which the OP acknowledges as a "doesn't help" but they don't share how to navigate this issue. Fluff article from someone peddling self-help. Icky, and case in point! How many entrepreneurs is Seth coaching? Oh right, he sells a product, he's not coaching [visibly]...).

So, we get our coaching from mentors and advisors. We still get our coaching.

That frustrated me for a long while, how hard it is to find a mentor even if you want to. Many of us are this "forced" to reinvent the wheel and stumble in the dark trying to learn as we go. I've gotten used to it and it even had its perks as it allows you to build a more robust sense of self, but I do reckon that it's not always ideal and it used to be a source of considerable emotional drag.

I'm sorry you had that experience. The silver lining is now you have an opportunity to pay it forward, and take on a mentee! It can be super rewarding. And sometimes you can earn advisor shares.

Also you say "even if you want to": Do you agree with the article that business leaders seem not to want coaches? I honestly haven't seen that.

I think if there's a silver lining it's that lessons that hurt get remembered. You make sure you never do that again if it was really painful.

Sometimes being told what you need to do fails to bring home how important it is and why it's really bad if you mishandle it.

Totally. And also, you own ALL your success, and ALL your failure.

Use your own smarts, read books about business building and talk to older people. But don't take any mentor at their word. I got burnt when younger by trusting somone whose advice almost destroyed everything I built. I came out of it stronger but I wish I never had to.

Ive never really had a mentor that was clearly defined (and i almost never see that)but Ive definitely had lots of periods in my career where people Ive respected gave me actionable advice and direction when I asked for it. Lots of people are interested in helping others.

I mean, that's _literally_ the model of Vistage, which is a peer-based group, but lead by a Chair that is that exact "retired business leader whose credibility based on past success justifies your making material changes."

Leaving the Chair out of things, you have organizations like EO, wherein you simply have a peer group of others, but EO is big on talking through a "gestalt" (rather than prescriptive) model, so that the material changes you make are what you take away, rather than an edict you have to follow.

And while there are obviously tons of lemons and charlatans, I think you'd be stunned by just how many ultra-high-performing CEOs and C-suite execs have coaches themselves, sometimes sourced from their companies (or their boards), and sometimes as personal endeavors.

Anecdotally, from my experience at London startups, people in leadership positions are _extremely_ coached. One of my biggest frustrations is always being _just_ outside of the circle of importance whereby my employer would actually pay for my career development.

Business leaders often are the coaches themselves. Mentoring, commenting tactics for their teams, and giving great feedback are part of their primary tasks (past a certain size). So do we really want the coaches to have coaches? How deep does the recursion go?

> Pianists, orators and athletes all have coaches.

Younger pianist and athletes do have coaches. That's because they can have some great abilities yet lack precious experience and maturity. And they can be helped with that by other, older practitioners who themselves may not (or no longer) be able to compete at the same level.

Indeed many older pianists no longer have teachers. Many senior concert players teach as well.

Part of the challenge is that virtually anyone can call themselves a coach. I can’t tell you how many “life coach” business cards there are on the boards in nice coffee shops and Whole Foods around me. How do you know that the coach is actually an expert in the subject AND a good teacher/coach to boot? If they’re so good, why are they coaching instead of doing and succeeding at it themselves? Obviously there are folks that were successful and are now retired and seemingly just want to pass their experience on, but I think those require some work to find. I do think there’s virtue in finding a mentor or coach but it can be challenging to do that. In the meantime finding a group of peers at the same level who are equally ambitious and willing to help each other - a mastermind group - can be a great substitute or stopgap until you can find such a coach or mentor.

I'd suggest looking into the ICF (International Coaching Federation), and finding a coach who's accredited with them.

They're really aware of the complexity of this - where they see the value of coaching as a tool, and know it's not a medical industry with the need for such high qualification time as eg. councellors or therapists, but that anyone calling themselves a coach means people do a lot of advice / self-help / general fluff without it being what they understand coaching to be. Getting accredited means having training, having certain number of logged hours doing coaching, recording sessions for assessment, passing an exam on ethics, limitations, confidentiality, methods, etc...

In the ICF understanding of coaching, a coach doesn't need to be a domain expert (although domain familiarity helps), as the coach's job is to help the coachee (client) be the expert / get unstuck / manage themselves. No matter how good a business leader I am, I'll never know your company and the individuals involved as well as you do. But if I'm good at asking you questions that help you see where you're stuck and see things in a different perspective, you'll come up with better solutions than I ever will. If I give you good advice, you'll see me as a guru or authority, and not build your own answers. And if you need a mentor, or advice, then in coaching that would come up and we could talk through ways you could find that.

(Disclaimer: I've completed an ICF accredited course, and am slowly working on my 100+ hours of coaching others and exams to be accredited).

The signs of a good coach will vary from capacity to capacity but some people do want to teach and have a knack for it, and they enjoy it more than being in the field. You see this a lot with tennis coaching, where former players stay in the game by becoming coaches(physical limitations/age obv. contribute here) but it isn’t so far fetched that someone in business/non-athletics would embark on a similar path.

I don’t want a coach who is an expert at X, I want a coach who is an expert at coaching.

If I’m paying them, I want both.

I’ve been reflecting on this a bit lately. I’d really like to find a personal mentor in the world of Software Engineering and tech leadership.

I think we tend to let mentoring happen naturally in that space. Devs naturally learn from more experienced folks as they work. Sadly I’ve spent a huge chunk of my time working solo over the last 5 years. I’ve recently joined a FANG company and I’m excited about the prospect of finding a mentor there. The networking aspect alone is pretty killer. In general it’s nice to be somewhere that my peers push me on a daily basis. This reminds me that I need to be more proactive about finding a mentor.

There's a difference between a mentor and a coach: coach gets paid.

Thanks to magic of internet, you can find programming coaches for relatively cheap:

https://codingcoach.io/

https://www.codementor.io/

https://mentorcruise.com/coach/coding/

Of course for most people "relatively cheap" is the same as "too much" which is why you're looking for a mentor and not a coach.

I’ve helped a lot of people with different types of issues related to software throughout my career without presuming to charge them for my time.

Coding is all about problem solving, which is typically the easy part of anything meaningful. Finding the right problems to solve is much harder.

I think the type of people that would be good mentors to me are beyond the point of needing any amount of money that would be reasonable to charge for their time. I think most people capable of meaningful mentorship, including myself, will likely be doing so for reasons other than financial gain.

That said I think getting coaching for various skills is totally valid, including coding. What I need, personally, is more about cultivating a healthy mindset about technology, strategy, and leadership. There are probably few people in the world that have something meaningful to say about those things.

From my experience mentoring at FAANG is hit and miss. You may get a mentor assigned, yes. The thing is that this person is probably just an engineer who also needs to do their daily job. While mentoring you is a part of their daily job, it competes with tasks that are well defined and affect their evaluation. Fixing bugs is measurable and visible. Mentoring isn't, beyond showing up and sharing some information.

So yes, being proactive about finding a mentor is a spot on advice.

It left me wondering if Seth has a coach. Does anyone know?

"Don't ask an encyclopedias seller whether you need an encyclopedia" (c)

Business "coaches" that are any good typically have skin in the game. Your boss does reviews and gives feedback and you take them seriously because your performance reflects on them, so you can trust that they are making a good faith effort. VCs don't just provide money but also validation that they think your idea (or team) has a hope of succeeding and typically have prior business experience and give feedback of various sorts. And you can trust that they aren't trying to sabotage you and they are making a good faith effort because if you succeed they grow richer and also grow their reputation.

"Coaching" is a negative term in some circles. In legal circles, it suggests you were told what to say to sound credible. I had that in mind when I first saw the title of this piece.

Business has a lot of legal ties. Perhaps that's part of why we speak of mentors and VCs and not coaches. In business, no one wants you to be coached to sound authentic when you are full of bull.

Mentors don't coach you in that sense. Instead, they help you genuinely grow into the role (or should).

Business coaching is a huge industry

> At the top tier of just about any sort of endeavor, you’ll find that the performers have coaches. Pianists, orators and athletes all have coaches.

I'm not sure this is true for all fields. Do chess masters have coaches? Do famous novel writers have coaches? Do top scientists have coaches? Maybe some, but it doesn't seem to be a staple.

Yes, chess masters at the top actually have groups of coaches (if they're preparing for an important match). Sometimes up to 5-10 people. Though it might not be so much coaches as "preparation team" - one of them might be the lead coach, one responsible for openings, one responsible for mental game, etc etc.

Novel writing is more subjective - if it were a clearly competitive endeavor with objective rules, I'm sure that the top performers would have coaches as well.

> if it were a clearly competitive endeavor with objective rules

I think this is the critical takeaway. Business and engineering are not "clearly competitive endeavour with objective rules", even though some attempt to make it so.

Top chess players rarely have coaches, they have seconds/assistants.

Novelists have editors.

But the real distinction that jumps out is cardinality. Most of the coached people are individual producers, or members of smaller teams. Not captains of industry.

But even captains of industry tend to have spouses or spiritual advisors or trainers of some sort.

Yeah, it seems weird that the examples they list are all literal performers, when they're trying to make a generalizing argument.

> Pianists, orators and athletes all have coaches.

Note that these are all, as we say in the software business, "individual contributors".

And the new accepted wisdom is that there can be no truly outstanding individual contributors. "10x developers" or whatever you might call them, cannot possibly exist, only people who "enable" teams can have any kind of significant impact.

And so it makes no sense to develop or coach extraordinary abilities in individual contributors.

Why this is being accepted despite the clear, overwhelming and long-standing evidence both from within the field and outside it, is beyond me.

In Business they are called consultants

Sounds like a psychiatrist to me. I guess this is why Bobby Axelrod pays Wendy $9m bonus.

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