By Steve Moran

I was sitting and working and watching (sort of) the Ravens / Tampa Bay football game. The commentators were talking about a high performing player (I wasn’t paying enough attention to tell you which one) and how, in spite of being an extremely high performer, he was incredibly “coachable.” It got me thinking about coachability in me and coachability in senior living.

I would start by saying the commentators got one thing wrong, and this is super important. It is almost 100% certain that he is a high performer because he is coachable.

7 Traits of Coachability

This is what coachability looks like:

  1. A willingness to change, which means a willingness to admit that no matter how good you are, you can get better. A willingness to admit you have blind spots where you think you are better than you are.
  2. A willingness to do hard work.
  3. A commitment to getting better, even when the coaching is difficult, and good coaching is always difficult.
  4. Patience. It takes time to get better, and this means there will be plenty of fails along the way. Part of patience is having grace for yourself and grace for others.
  5. Being accountable for your performance, which really means being able to admit you got it wrong and to make it better next time.
  6. Being willing to be wrong. Particularly not punishing others for challenging you, for pushing you.
  7. A deep desire to coach others.

Quicksand

If you encounter a leader whose career is going off the rails, you can just about bet that it is because they are not very coachable. They are not open to better ways of doing things. They have likely been offered better ways to do thing and rejected those ideas.

This means that if your career is off the rails, you may have a coachability problem yourself. There is research that shows derailed leaders are not coachable.

Career Stage

The older you are and the further along in your career is, the less coachable you tend to be. Those new leaders under 35 or 40 tend to be much more coachable; they still know they have a lot to learn. At that stage in life and career, it is also much easier to change direction than when you are in your 50s and 60s. This is completely in your control.

You can choose to be coachable at any age. I would even argue that if you are older and willing to be coachable, you will go further faster and easier because you have a lifetime of knowledge and experience to build on.

How coachable are you?