DETECTING LOW QUALITY COACHING

When I got a call this week from a senior manager who wanted to talk about Coaching, the conversation turned to the quality of coaching. He mostly wanted some ideas about how to flush out low-quality and incompetent coaches. Now he really didn’t know about Meta-Coaching, but upon seeing the website (which someone in his organization recommended to him), he was immediately impressed with several things: the rigorous training, the academic background in Meta-Coach training, the extensive materials about Meta-Coaching, and the benchmarking process for measuring competency.

When I asked him what problems motivated him to call me, he said, “There are two. First, there is the extreme levels of variability between coaches, some are competent, most are not. Second, many of the incompetent ones seem to know how to market themselves in a way that suggests they are competent, but they are not. So I want to know how to flush them out so we can get the good ones in.”

Then he added, pretty much as an after-thought, “How would you?” Ah, that gave me an idea! And I immediately blurted it out.