A story about a kid being in a sports school abroad triggered a thought.
The kid returned home at the end of the school year. The parents observed some changed behavior. The kid was going through learning loops much faster, why?
Well, at school they were daily coached to improve their sporting skills. So what happened is that not only the sporting skills were improved but also the ability to be coached, thus the learning capability.
Being coachable has become a routine (aka muscle memory).
Let’s share some experience most of us know. At school we all learned to be compliant with the (imposed) learning schedule offered at a given moment. About 2 times a year we were evaluated (kind of audit). A report was made measuring our degree of compliance (were we able to absorb the offered material in time) and all our mistakes were marked in red. Actually failure was penalized. The teacher had to adhere to some kind of learning plan developed by the government. Students, on the other hand, were learned to be compliant with the plans imposed on them, in other words this way or the highway.
This ‘compliance behavior’ is continued and embedded in organizations and companies. E.g. employees are evaluated once a year, performance is measured against having completed documents against a certain deadline in order to prove that the plan/process is followed.
This is an engagement model driven by control and compliance!
We learned to be a good boy or a good girl taking orders!
So ‘coachable behavior’ has to be learned and trained. By coaching and being coached as a learning model we become able to implement fast learning loops resulting in trust-based relationships (versus control-based relationships) and the capability to engage with uncertainty and taking bigger leaps in learning a capability.
The coach-coached relationship will focus on reinforcing the common purpose and to discover knowledge and develop capabilities.
This is an engagement model driven by trust and learning!
What is your engagement model?
Wim Bollen's blog 