3 Reasons Superstar Employees Need a Coach

In a New Yorker article titled, Personal Best—Top Athletes and Singers Have Coaches. Should you?, surgeon Atul Gawande writes, “No matter how well-trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where a coach comes in.”

In the article, Atul continues to share how, at age 45 and at the top of his profession, he leveraged a coach to build his “expert competence” and move him into undiscovered areas of surgical development.

Like Atul, you are a “genius, at the top of your game, and highly respected by your colleagues,” so why on earth would you need to a coach to improve? Will Rogers said, “When you are through changing you are through.” Below are three reasons even the best employees need a coach.

1. Leverage a pair of outside eyes and ears. What we perceive is often quite different from how others see or hear us. The best performers look to coaches for a neutral perspective so they can view problems more objectively with less emotional attachment.
2. Lift the “fog” and gain more clarity. Coaches help others see more clearly the path to action. They can ask just the right question or share a perfectly timed insight so that blinders come off and the coachee is able to create their own energy to execution…clarity is powerful!
3. Make better, faster decisions. Life and work boil down to solving and acting on problems. Many of us make “emotional” or hasty decisions. Even the best lack a systematic approach for thinking through challenges. Coaches bring more rigor to the mind game while streamlining the decision-making process.

In the words of Dr. Gawande, “Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Yet the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it. And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.