What is Coaching?

By Ken Norton

Executive coaching is distinct from advising, consulting, training, or mentoring. The differences can be subtle and further complicated because many people who call themselves coaches actually provide one or more of these other services. It’s no surprise that many people who contact me are unfamiliar with coaching – unless you’re a Fortune 500 CEO, few of us have encountered it in our professional lives.

People new to coaching often expect to bring questions and hope that their coach will have the answers. They are surprised to discover that coaching is precisely the opposite – coaches ask the questions, and clients provide the answers. But here’s the good news: when exposed to coaching, most people recognize how much more powerful it can be than advising, consulting, or mentoring and open up to it quickly. Like an innovative product, people don’t know to ask for coaching because they don’t know it exists. That’s my responsibility – to make sure potential clients understand what executive coaching is all about before they hire me. I wrote this article if you’re new to coaching to make it easier to understand the differences and make sure it’s what you’re genuinely seeking before you hire a coach.

To frame the discussion, let’s start by describing what coaching is not:

So what is it?

To understand coaching, let’s use a metaphor. The client has an agenda. It’s what they want to accomplish or learn about themselves. Imagine it as the summit of a mountain they want to climb. This could be something like, “I want to be a better product leader,” “I want more balance in my life,” or “I want to figure out what my authentic leadership style is.” The agenda guides the relationship going forward, and it’s how the client will measure success.

Over here is my agenda. It’s drawn from my experience and what’s important to me. It’s shaped by my lessons, what worked for me, what didn’t, what I want, and the environments I’ve been exposed to. If I were to give you advice, I bring these two agendas together. Advising is when the client’s goals meet “what I would do.”

Advice, even from someone accomplished, can be problematic. Here’s a good article from my friend and coaching colleague Kenneth Berger that explains why. Advice is situational – what worked for me might not work for you. You might nod your head but then choose to ignore it. Or you might follow it, and it could be wrong! Advice is prone to hindsight, survivorship, and confirmation biases. My advice might have been precisely the wrong thing to do, and I just got lucky. Or maybe I only think it worked for me, and it played no role in success – you can’t run independent A/B tests on life unless you’re entering the multiverse. Advice tends to be more for the advice-giver’s benefit than for the advice-receiver’s. They get to feel helpful, and smart. And advice isn’t always welcome. We all know how frustrating it can be to share an experience or situation and have the listener immediately jump to, “Here’s what you should do…”

I describe advice as a bit like cotton candy. It’s a sweet, enjoyable treat. Everyone is a little bit happier after some cotton candy. But it doesn’t contain any nutrition, and an hour or so later after the sugar high wears off, you’re right back where you started: hungry (with maybe a bit of a tummy ache).

But there’s a more profound reason why advice is so limited. And that’s because lurking below the client’s agenda is what coaches call the client’s “Big Agenda.”

The Big Agenda lives at the core of every human being and is exemplified by:

• The desire to live life in alignment with what truly matters to one’s most authentic self.
• The desire to live a life of conscious choice.
• The desire to be fully present to the experience of one’s life, moment by moment.

The Big Agenda is in alignment with what truly matters. It’s aligned with your values, conscious choice, and being fully present in each moment. Like a North Star for our life, it guides each of us in the direction of living a life we want and being who we want to be.

Now we see why advice, especially from someone who doesn’t know us as a whole person, is so bad – it’s barely scratching the surface! The agenda isn’t a mountaintop; it’s merely the visible part of an iceberg. It addresses content, not context. The client contains multitudes hiding below. Advice takes away the client’s agency and power over their own life because it neglects or ignores the whole person.

Coaching is all about restoring that power, teaming up with the client to help them connect their agenda to their Big Agenda under the surface. In the words of my credentialing body, the International Coaching Federation, coaching is “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

Coaches believe their clients are naturally resourceful, creative, and whole. Coaching emerged from the humanistic psychology tradition and the client-focused therapeutic work that followed. Coaches believe that people don’t need fixing or steering. They have the power and simply need a co-equal partner to stand alongside them. My agenda doesn’t enter the picture as a coach – I’m trained to be completely objective and non-judgmental. When I’m coaching, I hold my client’s agenda entirely. Like Ted Lasso says, coaches have learned to “Be curious, not judgmental.”

We’ve spent most of our lives immersed in other people’s opinions, expectations, and beliefs. We’ve been playing by their rules, looking to them for approval, and seeking the answers out there. Most of us aren’t really in tune with our Big Agendas, which is why coaching is so powerful. We sometimes know when there’s dissonance but aren’t connected to the underlying values that might be the source of that dissonance. We know when we’re feeling stuck but don’t always know why. We know that we’re longing for something but can’t always figure out what it is or how to get there. We know we want to get better, but we don’t usually know what “better” means or what to do next. That’s what coaches are here to help with! The coach brings tools and techniques to make this process fruitful. Coaching is a creative process to work with clients to evoke transformation.

With my clients, that’s a journey toward understanding their values, their vision for the type of life they want to lead, the perspective they’re taking, how they make decisions, how they confront their inner critic, how they tap into the leader within, and how they commit to their choices. It’s a combination of inner work and outer work. Only by connecting to the Big Agenda can the client live the life and career that is most meaningful and authentic to them. That’s coaching.

What does this have to do with product management or product leadership?!

At this point, you might be asking what, if anything, this has to do with product management and product leadership. If a coach doesn’t have an agenda, why not work with any old executive coach? If I’m not going to teach you product leadership or give PM advice, wouldn’t a random coach be just as helpful? In truth, I’ve been trained to coach any person on any topic, as have all ICF-credentialed coaches. So you don’t need a coach with domain experience to help you get results. I’ve chosen to focus on product leaders because that’s where my passion resides. You’re my tribe.

And because product leadership is really, really hard. We are generalists surrounded by experts. We are given responsibility without authority. There is no playbook to guide us. This lonely job triggers our inner critic on a daily basis. Yet, it can be some of the most rewarding work you’ll ever do. I love the craft of product management, and I love helping people achieve their dreams and grow as product leaders. I’m not a product coach; I’m a coach of people. And those people just happen to be product leaders.

Because I’ve been there and done the job, my clients and I have a shared vocabulary. You don’t need to explain the nuances of the job. I get it. You won’t need to hold back on the buzzwords or terminology. My decades of PM experience often help guide me to the right question as a coach. My familiarity with the content helps me reveal the context. I’ve been there, I’ve struggled with some of the same challenges, and I’ve seen the patterns that emerge from working with scores of executive coaching clients. I’ve helped people like you grow and get results. And all of that experience has made me a better coach to other product leaders. There are also occasional moments to bring stories from my personal experience and bits of mentorship to my clients. But I must ensure these “mentorship moments” always follow the coaching.

What has been most humbling about coaching is how often my questions proved to be more powerful than my answers might have been were I wearing an advisor or consultant hat. Curiosity is so much more important than being right. Learning that my instincts around what to do were often flawed, or at least limited, helped me fully embrace coaching. I am reminded of this every day when I witness my clients take control of their own lives and careers in a way that is authentic to who they are. Advice is about the situation the client is facing. Coaching is about the whole person.

If this makes sense to you, learn more about my executive coaching or apply now.