Here’s a fool-proof way to fail in your coach training endeavors: Train everybody, right now, in big groups. In so doing, you’re denying the very methodology that makes coaching powerful. You can’t produce coaches on a factory assembly line. Good coaches are more like plants—they need to be grown and cultivated and come alongside and watered.
It’s a classic case of short-term thinking vs. long-term thinking. Training en-mass—big groups all at once—works in such a way as to guarantee minimal results long-term. We’re caught in the rat race trying to train as many coaches as possible to keep up with the activity when only those who are patient enough to plant seeds and let them grow will see the real fruit.
I do a bit of coach-training and I could not agree more. One Facebook friend took notice that one day I had five client calls. He told me I needed to do conference calls, get all of them together at once. Conference calls are good for long-distant consulting but coaching (whether coaching coaches or just plain coaching) works best because it is one-on-one.
Reminds me of Eugene Peterson in “Under the Unpredictable Plant” when he says: ‘Why do pastors so often treat congregations with the impatience and violence of developers building a shopping mall instead of the patient devotion of a farmer cultivating a field?” (135)
I love the analogy of seed-planting- slow, organic, patient. Seems to me the model of Kingdom growth most often applied by Jesus. Thanks for the reminder!