Why Coaching Doesn’t Work

Lately, I’ve been challenging myself to engage in discussions and listen to people I disagree with. In a world full of echo chambers, fighting confirmation bias –  the tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already believe – is a rare and valuable skill.

Research shows that being open to opposing views improves decision-making, broadens perspectives, enhances creativity, and generally just gets you invited to more happy hours—all good things.

As you can imagine, it’s going horribly. I’m currently reading a book called Leadership BS, where the author is in the midst of destroying every belief I hold true and dear. The premise is that everything we’re doing as leaders and coaches is nonsense. He talks about how the vast majority of advice, books, seminars, and coaching leads nowhere. He focuses on failure in the leadership development/training space:

• Employee retention, engagement, and enjoyment are all plummeting

• Corporate behavior is still terrible: 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies had engaged in misconduct significant enough to be reported in the national media between 2000 and 2005.

• 50% of all leaders and managers are evaluated to “to be ineffective in their current role.” Where ineffective means being a disappointment, incompetent, a mis-hire, or a complete failure. Harsh.

• A poll of the American workforce where 35% of employees reported that they would “willingly forgo a substantial pay raise in exchange for seeing their direct supervisor fired”

We have similar stats in the coaching space where nearly 60% of people trying to lose weight give up after three months, and the average amount of time on a weight loss program is about five weeks. In my experience, only ~20-40% of people see results on a weight loss program, and of those who do, only 3% keep the weight off.

Did I ruin your Friday yet?

These stats are disheartening, not just because I’ve dedicated the past ten years of my career to health and fitness but also because I expect to spend the next ten in the leadership development space. Your boy has found the sweet spot of failure. 

So, where does this leave us? Should we quit, go sell coconuts in Fiji, and cry ourselves to sleep every night? As you might expect, I’m pushing back on the premise that coaching and leadership doesn’t work (I told you I wasn’t doing a great job fighting confirmation bias). Today, I want to explore WHY coaching isn’t working (at large) and share some solutions for us to maximize our effectiveness as coaches and leaders.

The Two Challenges

Although there are many reasons why these numbers might be, there are two big buckets I want to discuss here: 

1. Market Challenges

I love studying great coaches in sports. There’s a ton to learn from them (see my latest pod on the great Greg Popovich), but there comes a point where leadership and health coaching diverge from sports coaches.

In sports, there are rules for how to play, clear metrics to measure performance (scores, wins, losses, etc.), and events are time-bound. They also get to coach the 1% freaks in society—professional athletes are just wired differently. Literally every NBA player thinks they’re the greatest to ever touch a ball. That delusion likely contributes to why they’re in the NBA in the first place. And lastly, there are usually huge incentives for the people they’re coaching (Olympic medals, millions of dollars, shoe deals, fame, etc.).

But in our world, the client is paying us with their hard-earned money, time, and attention, and there’s an underlying expectation that you’ll take care of everything. It’s perceived as a transaction like buying a car or a stack of waffles. I paid you X and expect to get Y. There’s no clear, universal, time-bound metric to measure success. Everyone has different goals, expectations, and desires. There’s confusion and overwhelm about what change looks like and how it should feel. I’ve had clients lose 15 pounds in 4 months and be ecstatic, and I’ve had other clients lose 20 pounds in 3 months and be pissed. 

2. Change is Hard

In 1847, Hungarian physician Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis worked in a Viennese hospital and discovered that mothers who were delivering babies in the hospital were dying at a much larger rate than mothers who delivered their babies at home.

After observing the nurses, Dr. Semmelweis discovered it was a sanitary issue. Physicians went from one woman to the next without taking any sanitary precautions (like washing their hands), thereby spreading infection.

He introduced hand washing with a chlorine solution, and mortality fell from an average of 10% to about 1.5%. His reward? He was ostracized and ultimately fired for pushing people to wash their hands DESPITE the results. Damn his witchcraft and wizardry. Then, in the 1860s, Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, and hand washing became a generally accepted practice.

So now we have a proven theory and social acceptance. Let's add the element of time and fast-forward 150 years. In 2002, the CDC found that adherence to hand-washing guidelines in healthcare settings averaged just 40 percent. 

Let's let that sink in.

There was a simple solution that was socially accepted and proven by science to save lives. And yet, the odds that your healthcare professional washed their hands before examining you are worse than putting your life savings on black on the roulette wheel.

Now, take something complex and nuanced as leadership challenges and health. How can we possibly expect great results? We've chosen a difficult profession and like a major league baseball player, if we get a hit 30% of the time, we're a hall of famer. 

So what do we do? Well, despite all the stats in the introduction, and the click-baity subject line, I still firmly believe that coaching works.

I've had clients tell me years later how much I've helped them change physically, mentally, and emotionally.  I've personally been the beneficiary of great coaches, mentors, and leaders in my life.

Coaching may not be working at a mass scale (at least not right now), but there are things we can do to be more effective at our craft. 

Solutions 

Empower people to take control of their lives

As coaches, we're responsible for educating and empowering our clients to participate in the process. Too many clients come into the coaching relationship expecting us to wave a magic wand and melt the fat. It's our job to have more nuanced conversations about how weight loss works and what to expect throughout the process. There's three ways we can do a better job of this:

Set clear expectations: Have expectation conversations with your clients. How does the process look, and what should they expect? What kind of results do they expect? How does weight loss work?

Tie in personal meaning: Author Harold Kushner once wrote, "Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life." As coaches, we need to do a better job of understanding client's motivations for change and personal values. Why do they want this? What's the benefit of changing? What's the downfall of not changing? 

Give more autonomy: We empower our clients by painting a realistic picture of change and their role in it. We empower them by giving them autonomy and choice in the process. Humans hate feeling like we're being influenced or coerced (even the ones who come in and say, "Tell me what to eat, and I'll eat it!"). When we tell clients they have to do this or eat that, we're subtly taking away their autonomy. We should give clients guardrails (like setting calories or macro numbers) but then get out of the way and allow them to make their own decisions. 

Track and Measure

Nutrition coach and PhD Trevor Kashey has helped clients lose a collective 245,897 pounds (and counting), and has an average client retention of two years. Clients typically only leave him because they feel they have the tools to change permanently. His big secret? Tracking. 

Kashey says, "I quickly 'solved' hundreds of problems just by virtue of improving a person's awareness of their own behavior." Something we are all astonishingly poor at is self-awareness. There's a well-known study from 1992 where researchers looked at people who were overweight and who claimed to be unable to lose weight despite the fact they were eating "just 1,000 calories a day." CLASSIC. How many times have we heard, as coaches, "I'm doing everything right and can't lose weight"? Researchers discovered that those people actually consumed double that, which is like forgetting about a whopper and medium fry for lunch.

When trying to change anything, tracking is the most important thing. What gets measured gets managed. What gets inspected gets affected. [Insert your favorite cliché here].

When we track, it focuses our attention and, if nothing else, makes problems more noticeable. Oftentimes, the problem starts to fix itself just by monitoring. The "Hawthorne effect" is a behavioral phenomenon that describes how people change how they act when they know they are being watched (even by themselves).

Too many coaches share their favorite tips and fortune cookie wisdom without tracking whether it works. Tracking is the best way to hold clients accountable, and too often, we're dropping the ball.

Remove Limiting Factors

My leading candidate for “Best Study I Read This Year” is from Professor Leidy Klotz out of the University of Virginia. Klotz performed a series of studies asking people to improve certain processes — things like architecture blueprints, essays, recipes, etc. Nearly everyone tries to add something: an ingredient, a sentence, another step. NOBODY thinks of removing elements to make improvements (and Klotz set it up so that nearly everything would be improved by elimination).

As coaches, we’re not immune. We constantly ask clients to add new things—meal prep, peloton workouts, meditation, journaling, cold plunges, supplement stacks, etc. It makes us feel useful and valuable, but rarely is the key to results adding the new shiny thing. Instead, we need to figure out how to remove barriers keeping people stuck. 

Remove barriers to poor sleep or recurring stressors that cause our clients to eat more. Help them set boundaries with the friend that they crush a 12-pack and bad of Cheeto Puffs with. Set structure for the hot dog eating competitions that always seem to occur on the weekends. 

Don’t forget the ripple effect

And finally, don't forget the ripple effect of your work. If you're like me, the stats from the intro can make you feel hopeless. Like our work doesn't matter, and then the self-fulfilling prophecy comes into effect.

My dad once told me a story about when he rejoined a grocery chain he had retired from a few years earlier. He was at the company's annual conference, where awards were being handed out. One of the award recipients was a younger man who was being recognized for his good work and being one of the organization's future leaders. 

The guy gets to the podium and says, "You know, there's a guy I want to acknowledge publicly. I'm not sure where he is now, but I wouldn't be here without my first store manager, Jim Coleman. I don't know where I'd be. Jim changed my life. I'm proof that the work you all do has an impact." 

Little did he know, Jim Coleman, my father, was right there in the audience. My dad had no idea the impact he had on the young man.

One of my favorite studies of all time is by Yale psychologist Gad Yair, called Cinderella + The Ugly Ducklings. Yair studied successful people who, on paper, shouldn't have been successful. They were average students. They never had any stand-out talents as kids. They were average by every perceivable metric and went on to succeed in a variety of fields. Without fail, Yair found there were distinct turning points in these people's lives where somebody told them they had potential. That they're better than they think. 

The work we do matters. And it works. We just may not always get to see it come to fruition. It's likely we'll have no idea how impactful the work is we're doing and chances are we won't be out in the crowd to hear others giving us our flowers.

But that doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and it certainly doesn't mean it's "Leadership BS"