Learning to Be Disliked by Your Clients
Good morning, fellow coaches. Gary Henson here, with a short blog thought on an important lesson you’re probably working through in your own practice: fighting the temptation to seek popularity as a coach, both with your clients and with their employees.
One of the reasons you and I went into coaching is that we like people. We love seeing people break through to change. And, frankly, we just plain like people. But this can be a temptation point at times, when we hold off tough feedback to our clients because we crave popularity as a coach.
Let me state simply what I’ve learned from hard experience: never seek popularity as a coach. Ever. You will only hurt your interests and those of your client. What you need to build instead of popularity is a sense of respect from those who follow you. Your clients and their employees may want to follow a nice or popular leader, but they need to follow a strong leader who is not always saying “yes” to them. They also need to follow someone who will put the best interests of their company first, even if you risk offending them as their coach, and yes, possibly losing the account.
This last sentence leads to the one fear we as coaches have that leads us to sugarcoat things instead of being clear and honest: we want to avoid conflict in the organization. Here’s what I’ve learned though: popularity seeking leaders and coaches are the ones who actually have the most conflict in their organizations in the long run. Why? Because popularity seeking leads to dishonesty with your client, i.e. not telling them the whole truth. That leads to lack of trust and respect. And those issues lead to division in the organizations you coach, opening the way for more driven people to highjack the bus. Hijacked buses are no fun to be on, and less fun to coach.
Do us all a favor. Tell it like it is, make the client angry, and work it out. There’s alot of mileage in respect.
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