Performance Coaching and Career Coaching

In companies, I’d suggest that there are two forms of (real) coaching.  Why do I add real in parentheses?  Because there are so many things that people call coaching, which really are not coaching.  Such as mentoring, which is about giving advice based on experience. 

Coaching is not advice.  So what is it? It’s asking questions to help the individual to become an independent, critical thinker.  If you give them the space and support to think for themselves, they will come up with the best fit answers for their situation. 

As I said, there are two forms of coaching that we need to use in our work, one is performance coaching and one is career coaching. 

If the supervisor and career counselor are one and the same person, this person must be very clear when they are in performance coaching mode, and when they are in career coaching mode, because the beliefs behind the coaching are different. 

For the performance coach (supervisor), the belief is that my job as coach is to help the individual to meet or exceed business performance expectations, aligned to the business strategy, for their current role. 

For the career coach (usually the career counselor), the belief is that my job is to help the coachee to explore what they want from their career, what direction they want to take, wherever that may take them.  This can be hard for the supervisor/career counsellor, because the supervisor has a vested interest in keeping their A-players in their current roles – but if they had the mental model that this person would excel more if they were empowered to search out their own best fit role, then the business would gain a more motivated and higher performing individual.

	Primarily facilitated by	Purpose	Focus	Approach	Agenda owner	Frequency	Intended outcome
Performance Coaching	Supervisor	Drive business strategy into execution	What’s your story this year?	Sets and holds people accountable to goals and behavior on-the-job	Supervisor is responsible for business performance; individual is responsible for personal performance	bi-weekly	High performance delivered
Career Coaching	Career Counselor	Obtain career clarity	What’s your longer-term career story?	Asks powerful questions to tap individual’s vision, wisdom, & directed action in service of individual’s self-identified agenda	Both career counselor and individual hold individual’s agenda	Monthly	People are in engaging, meaningful roles

 

Tell me what you think of this.  I’d welcome your views in the comments.