The Art of Coaching: Coaching Versus Training

"You've done a bit of that coaching stuff; see if you can pull a bit of a training workshop together for the team"

"There's not much classroom training going on in the summer, so put yourself about and do some one to one coaching instead"

"I like that coach we hired, see if we can get her to deliver the customer service workshops"

Whilst I won't pretend that they are direct quotes, these senior management style comments do serve to illustrate the foggy understanding of the differences between training and coaching and suggest some of the difficulties that might be encountered in moving from one discipline to the other. They also suggest that those who commission or purchase training and coaching are unclear of the differences and risk using the wrong tool for the wrong job.

Coaching is not training one to one ("Sitting by Nellie") and training is not group coaching. While both are ultimately concerned with making people bigger and better at what they do, training is a teacher centred approach best deployed when a performance gap to do with a lack of knowledge or skill has been identified. A good example would be providing training to a salesperson with a poor record of upselling because he has a poor grasp of the finance options or has never been taught the various accessory packages his dealership offers. Coaching on the other hand is a learner centred approach that is best used in addressing performance gaps that are to do with attitude or state of mind. If our salesman knows his product range and sales techniques inside out and backwards more training is not going to help. If he is experiencing fatigue, boredom, stress, lack of focus, etc., coaching is what he needs.

Classroom trainers have always been asked to carry out one to one training when the need arises and that practice still happens. The problem is calling this activity coaching. I was once invited to sit in on some coaching taking place in a contact centre. This consisted of a sales trainer listening in on an adviser's call and afterwards pointing out the mistakes that had been made and the sales leads that had been missed. The adviser listened dutifully but didn't learn a lot and was left to raise his performance by "trying harder". This is not coaching. At best it is feedback, at worst it is destructive criticism.

What if we want our trainers to be coaches too? Trainers know about engaging the learner by asking questions, differing speeds of learning, adult learning styles and so on. The good news is that as coaches they will definitely need to be drawing on their skills in these areas.

The bad news is that a lot of other things they do as a trainer will be counter productive as a coach. The most obvious examples being instructing and telling. In training - particularly technical training - these are vital skills and we use them to pass on information and check that we have been understood. In coaching we're more concerned with helping learners find their own way forward and are probably best advised to avoid telling and instructing as far as possible. This is because when we tell or instruct we assume responsibility for making the learning happen, we deny our learners the opportunity to think for themselves and we end up simply passing on our recipe which is unlikely to quite as appropriate for our learner anyway.

A wish to help people achieve their own aims is a useful beginning but the best advice for the trainer cum potential coach is to undertake some formal coaching skills training. The options available for doing so are many and various and outside the scope of this article. My recommendation would be to start by articulating exactly what you want your coach training to do for you; as precisely as you can before looking at what the different providers offer.