The Distinction of Corporate Coaching, Part 4
Snapshot
By George Watson, BusinessCoach.com Canada
Coaching often gets confused with Consulting because a lot of Consultants now call themselves Coaches. Both disciplines are about supporting and changing organizations and becoming more competitive and achieving better results. Both can design and lead workshops, work with teams and provide support services for company leaders and executives.
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Corporate Coaching vs. Consulting & Counseling
By George Watson, BusinessCoach.com Canada
Consulting
Coaching often gets confused with Consulting because a lot of Consultants now call themselves Coaches. Both disciplines are about supporting and changing organizations and becoming more competitive and achieving better results. Both can design and lead workshops, work with teams and provide support services for company leaders and executives.
We define Consulting as a service that provides “expert” advice in a particular domain or field. For example, a marketing consultant would be hired to determine and recommend new marketing programs or solutions for an organization. A Consultant brings certain expertise or competence in a particular area where the company has breakdowns or concerns.
A Coach may not necessarily have great expertise in any particular area at all. The fundamentals of Corporate Coaching reside within a new interpretation of what a business organization is and how it operates at a foundational level. As a Corporate Coach we view organizations as a linguistic entity. That is, we make the distinction that an organization is made up of people engaged in a conversational (linguistic) game to achieve something declared as missing or desirable. Getting to that goal and winning the game is the objective.
Within the business game, we invent strategies and tactics for winning in conversations. We form teams of players to execute repetitive actions that are necessary in implementing these strategies. We work together, coordinate our actions and conversations, and declare breakdowns and breakthroughs. Within all this framework we find ourselves in different moods and emotions that influence the game.
A Corporate Coach works within the domains of conversations, rules, tools and structures, and moods and emotions. Our expertise lies within these domains. Because of this reality, a Corporate Coach does not need to be an expert in any specific industry or business discipline. Corporate Coaching focuses on the conversations, body, and moods of the individuals and teams that form the organization. The Corporate Coach is an expert in the foundation of every business: to carry out and have conversations of exchange.
Counseling
Counseling takes many forms in business organizations. It can refer to a process to correct performance deficiencies or it could refer to a program for substance abuse. Counseling has its roots in a psychological discourse, coaching in our interpretation doesn’t. Counseling attempts to “peal back the onion” and get to the “real” person and discover the reasons for the “dysfunction.” Once this is discovered, counseling traditionally attempts to “fix or heal” the past or come to acceptance. We are not saying that counseling does not work or that there is not a place for counseling. To the contrary, we view counseling as a valuable practice. However, we are saying that coaching as we define it is not counseling and should not rely on a psychological interpretation of what it means to be human.
Coaching does not rely on psychological methods and processes for finding the cause behind the dysfunction or lack of performance. It aims to generate new competencies and new ways of taking action. Coaching works because it allows for a person to re-invent themselves, to generate new ways of being and acting that over time create a new identity and in essence reconstitute the person differently.
Coaching looks to unlock the bond between cause and effect. It accomplishes this by separating the facts from the story that we all generate automatically. It breaks the connection between the facts and story, allowing the person to look at the facts newly.
The connection between what happened and our story about it is important. Once we make the connection, we typically act out of the cause we have assigned. As an example, once we have assessed ourselves or have been assessed by others as “non-mechanical”, we tend to act consistent with that declaration. We will be unable to fix things mechanical and rely on others to do those tasks. If asked why we can’t take the action associated with being mechanical, we will claim that we are not mechanical like a fixed property of our self, assuming that the cause and effect are tied forever.
Given this unbreakable bond, we can never learn to become mechanical. Learning mechanics is a domain of permanent disability. The process of destroying the bond between cause and effect can be powerful as it allows the Coachee the freedom not to continue to act because of some interpretation or assessment. This gives the Coachee new freedom to change their actions and act “for no reason.” It allows the player to see what is missing for him to be able to take new actions, to learn, to rehabilitate his body to act differently.
Coaching and counseling aim for similar results in bringing about change in peoples actions. The approach however is different.
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