If professional athletes who are arguably among the best in the world need coaches, why wouldn’t we?
Came across the now decade-old essay by Atul Gawande entitled Personal Best: The Coach in the Operating Room and wanted to jot down some quick thoughts while they’re fresh.
1. If we are serious about getting better at something, we need a way to measure our performance over time. Surgeons have rates of complications benchmarked nationally. Athletes have speed, distance, strength, and other sport-specific measures. What is your profession’s measure of performance? How do we measure our progress?
2. We are unlikely to reach our true professional peak if we don’t use all the learning methods available to us. The 70–20–10 model for learning states that managers learn 70% of their knowledge from job experiences, 20% from their interactions with others, and 10% from formal educational training. If we are to get better at our professions, we’ll need to tap all three.
3. If professional athletes who are arguably among the best in the world have coaches, why shouldn’t we have a coach for our chosen profession? Coaches fall within the second learning category — interactions with others — but only certain professional disciplines (e.g., sports, singing) see coaching as something that’s perfectly normal to have. Have we artificially constrained ourselves by thinking that coaching doesn’t apply to our profession?
4. Coaching can amplify the effectiveness of other learning methods. In the example quoted below, coaching led to the higher adoption of new techniques that teachers learned from workshops.
California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced — when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions — adoption rates passed ninety per cent.
from Personal Best, New Yorker
5. For coaching to be effective, one must be coachable. One must have an open-minded willingness to learn and improve, ask for and receive feedback effectively, have an internal drive to learn, set and achieve concrete learning goals, and be capable of self-awareness and self-reflection.
Coachability, quite simply, means that a person is receptive to feedback, to receiving constructive criticism, and will use that feedback and constructive criticism to improve his/her/their workplace performance. It refers to one’s ability to learn and grow from the instruction of another, be it a teacher, mentor, or peer.
from How coachable are you?, Intellectual Capital Resources
6. Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components. While a great coach doesn’t need to be personally great at the specific discipline they’re coaching people on, they do have to understand the discipline well enough to recognize the components that must be honed to improve performance. Not everyone is a good coach.
Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. Good coaches speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves.
from Personal Best, New Yorker
7. Small things have a way of becoming big things when we don’t do them right. Something that is trivially off now, if not immediately attended to, can become a problem later. A big part of a coach’s value comes from their ability to see the downstream implications of these seemingly trivial things so you can nip them in the bud before they become problems.
Basketball coach John Wooden, at the first squad meeting each season, even had his players practice putting their socks on. He demonstrated just how to do it: he carefully rolled each sock over his toes, up his foot, around the heel, and pulled it up snug, then went back to his toes and smoothed out the material along the sock’s length, making sure there were no wrinkles or creases. He had two purposes in doing this. First, wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters cost games. Second, he wanted his players to learn how crucial seemingly trivial details could be. “Details create success” was the creed of a coach who won ten N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships.
from Personal Best, New Yorker
8. People learn when they’re prompted to think rather than being told what to think or what to do. We do others a disservice when we don’t give them a chance to come up with their own answers as they wrestle with their challenges.
He was an unusual teacher. He never quite told you what to do. As an intern, I did my first splenectomy with him. He did not draw the skin incision to be made with the sterile marking pen the way the other professors did. He just stood there, waiting. Finally, I took the pen, put the felt tip on the skin somewhere, and looked up at him to see if I could make out a glimmer of approval or disapproval. He gave me nothing. I drew a line down the patient’s middle, from just below the sternum to just above the navel. “Is that really where you want it?” he said.
from Personal Best, New Yorker
Originally posted at mdynotes.com
