Being more than just coachable…

So Abhinav has written a very good article on the importance of being coachable and why that will help your growth. Reading it triggered more thoughts than what makes sense to write as a comment, hence here an opinion follow-up post…

One of my pet-peeves when interacting with teams is a certain shyness leading to top-down communication. I blame it on my extrovertedness and how I have been raised, but coaching people that do not give feedback is extremely hard. And if you only give positive feedback (or only negative for that matter), you are actually not giving feedback either.

Picking up from Abhinav’s points of “listen”, “humility”, “coaches are mere mortals” and “not taking things personally” we have already all of my reasoning, but it’s a little too implicit for my taste. So here we go:

1. Corollary 1: Coaches want your best but are far from infallible.
2. Corollary 2: Listening helps you understand

From corollary 1 we conclude that every now and then, coaches will say things that are wrong. Unless you listen actively, which means you don’t just store the information but challenge it, it is unlikely that these mistakes will be uncovered. In the worst case this will set you off in a completely wrong path.

Now if you listen actively (not just to the voice), there is a chance that you might pick up that something is off. Maybe you don’t understand it correctly, maybe the coach jumbled up the words or is just plain wrong about it.

In all three situations you only win, if you ask for clarification. No matter how experienced you are. As Abhinav points out, we can learn something from everybody, so even an experienced coach can learn from a beginners question at least the fact that the given explanation was not clear enough. And most likely you won’t be the only one that does not get it… so don’t be shy and ask.

Disagree, if needed. Disagreement is not disrespect. The way disagreement is delivered may be disrespectful, but if a coach cannot see that difference, they are not suited to be a coach.

So question the things that a coach tells you, don’t just listen. And speak up, if something is unclear. And if you need to mull over things first, do so and ask next training, or after the drill. But most importantly: ask.

And your questions will not just help the coaches to become better, it will avoid misunderstandings for the whole team and it will make you grow faster because it instills the expert-level top-down thinking—as Abhinav called it—in you right from the start.

And trust me, teams that get this right, learn faster, are more flexible and more fun. Because you’ll act like a team and not a robot: inefficient at times but capable of solving the unprecedented.