
Clare Norman’s suggestions will help you decide whether or not you are ready for coaching
Coaching in business offers a range of benefits, contributing to both individual and organisational growth. But coaching requires great care; it is important that attention is paid to the coaching readiness of the person being coached. It is also crucial to remember that not every issue is coachable and not every person is ready.
Good fit or not?
There are a number of signs that coaching is not a good fit, the most obvious being that the individual clearly has no desire to change. Also, the individual cannot be pressured into coaching when they don’t really want it or see a need for it – even if this coercion is well-meant.
Here are a few other signs to look out for:
- The subject matter requires more of a therapeutic intervention or is a physical health issue. There are others more suitably qualified to work with the individual in these arenas.
- The individual has just taken on a new role (such as a first-time team lead) and really needs relevant training before coaching.
- The individual’s line manager has neglected their own developmental responsibilities, therefore failing to nip falling standards in the bud, and wishes to outsource to a coach to “fix” the person. HR needs to intervene here to challenge the line manager to manage performance. This is often a systemic issue where line managers are not held to account for managing people.
- The timing is not right for the individual or their organisation. This is a tricky one to gauge because coaching can really help people in times of big change to get to grips with their own transition through that change, but sometimes the change can be such a distraction as to fragment the individual’s focus and their ability to engage in the coaching.
These aspects need to be screened for by the coaching custodian (HR, L&D, talent professional) such that when a coach agrees to a compatibility call (the preliminary conversation between a coach and a potential client to assess whether they’re a good match for working together), coaching is deemed to be the right intervention at the right time for the right person. Also, the coaching custodian needs to have explained to the individual how coaching works and how to make the most of it.
This means that the compatibility meeting is just that – checking there is a good fit for working together, rather than checking that coaching is a good fit for the issue and the individual.
Coaching readiness
Collectively taking a stand to influence coaching custodians is a big step change for coaches as a profession. It will ensure that every party extracts value from the coaching assignment – the person being coached (the thinker), their line manager, the organisation as a whole, and the coach.
This isa two-way agreement – both have a say in whether they want to work with each other. Yes, relationships build over time, but the coach must listen to their intuition just as much as the person being coached uses their gut to decide fit.
After the coaching readiness stage, there is building coachability – one email, one conversation, one session at a time. Every step of the way is an opportunity to build coachability.

Defining coachability
Coachability isn’t about having things done to you in a passive manner. Many dictionary definitions talk about coachability as being receptive to feedback and instruction, being malleable, responsive, obliging, and conformable – which is all very reactive.
These descriptions are almost the polar opposite of what I mean by coachability, which is much more proactive and comes from within the thinker: a willingness to think for themselves, having or being willing to build a sense of agency, of self-efficacy, taking the initiative, leaning in.
The coach’s role is to pull coachability out of the thinker, rather than attempting to pour something in through teaching and telling. Coachability and agency can wax and wane, so the coach needs to bring it into their own and the thinker’s awareness and discuss how to nurture it at any given time in the coaching process.
- How willing are you to go deep in their thinking versus superficial thinking or asking for the coach’s thinking?
- What about your willingness to make change happen in your life and work?
- What about your psychological readiness for that change? Homeostasis is so much more comfortable (even if it’s painful) than change because it’s about what we know as opposed to what we don’t know[1].
- How willing are you to push past the discomfort of change?
Curiosity is key. As is a growth mindset[2] and a propensity for hope.
If a thinker comes to coaching believing that there’s only one right answer (a fixed mindset, ostensibly developed to pass exams), the coaching may feel more difficult for them. Coaches can nurture more of the growth mindset, the desire to find multiple ways of seeing the world. Coaching is ‘a joint endeavour to discover new thinking’ [3]. New thinking, not known thinking.
Creating value is important in coaching, but the role of the coach is to cultivate that value via the thinker rather than taking that mantle themselves Yes, the coach has the thinker’s best interests at heart, but that best interest is in building their thinking muscles rather than doing the thinking for them.
The thinker is ‘creative, resourceful and whole’ [4] and therefore they’re perfectly capable of creating that value. By seeing the thinker as creative, resourceful and whole, the coach is holding in mind the best version of this person in front of them that they might have forgotten about [5]. Sometimes the thinker has lost their own connection with this best self, and the coach can rekindle hope by reconnecting them with the wholeness of who they are.
Tapping into their own resourcefulness involves (among other things) cultivating hope within the thinker, hope that they can go forward once coaching has finished: ‘…hopeful thought reflects the belief that one can find pathways to desired goals and become motivated to use those pathways’ [6].
With all that as context about what coachability is, look at the whole coaching process through a coachability lens:
Ask the following questions:
- How are the introductory and ongoing emails written with coachability front and centre?
- How are discussions of coachability incorporated in your coaching agreement and three-way agreement conversations and written documentation?
- How is any preparatory work that your coach sends out written with coachability in mind? And the reflective practice after each session?
- What do they consider within a coaching session to draw out coachability?
- How do they co-create the experiments that might happen in between sessions, to build self-efficacy and agency?
- And at the end of a coaching programme, how do you reflect together on ways to keep that agency?
We need to make coaching more accessible, to support people to think deeply for themselves to discover their own contribution to the world. Effective coaching empowers employees, strengthens teams, and aligns individual aspirations with business objectives.
References
[1] Leonard, G (1991) Mastery: The keys to success and long-term fulfilment. Penguin.
[2] Dweck, C (2017) Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential, 6th edition. Random House Publishing.
[3] Norman, C (2022) The Transformational Coach. Right Book Press.
[4] Whitworth, L, Kimsey-House, H & Sandahl, P (1998) Co-active Coaching. Davies Black Publishing.
[5] Eisenstein, C (2018) URL: charleseisenstein.org/courses/living-in-the-gift/
[6] Snyder, C R, Lopez, S J & Edwards, L M (2021) The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press.