What To Look For In a Coach

One of the most popular Saturday Night Live sketches featured cast member Chris Farley as motivational speaker Matt Foley.  The recurring sketch appeared eight times while Farley was on the show, one time Foley actually performed it in Spanish.

The setup had Matt Foley come into a home.  He’d be disheveled and hyped, and he would open his motivational talk for the kids.  The joke was Matt Foley was always talking about motivation and success, while he was neither.  Farley would end each rendition noting that if the kids failed to listen to his coaching, they would end up… “Living in a van down by the river.” 

Of course, Matt Foley himself lived in a van down by the river.

That phrase is now synonymous with someone giving others guidance that they weren’t following themselves. 

I’ve been coaching church planters for 40 years, and I’ve been coached as a church planter and leader for over 40 years, so, obviously, I’m old!  But more than that I’ve had the opportunity to see the good, the bad, and the ugly in coaching over the years.  My conclusion:  the good is better!  Here are the top five qualities I look for in good coaches:

1.      Credibility

“Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.” --1 Corinthians 11:1

Paul did not say, “Follow me as I try to fake my way through this…”  Credibility is key.

Scott Adams quipped, “Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.”

Credibility means the quality of being believed.  It’s the characteristic of appearing believable or trustworthy based on a person's experience, expertise or reliability. It is essential as it influences how information is received and accepted by others.

But credibility takes more than that!

There’s an old saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”  Nice saying, but it doesn’t work.  The best coaches have been there, done that and are further down the road than the people they coach.

For my second church plant, the denomination I was a part of assigned a coach to me who had never started a church and clearly didn’t know much about starting a church.  That organization spent a lot of effort and money training folks who were not credible to be coaches of leaders.  The technical term for this approach is:  A colossal waste of time.

In our networks we encourage leaders to pick their own coach.  And I have never seen a leader choose a coach who wasn’t an effective leader or who was not further down the road than the one who chose them.  Planters want credibility.

Now some effective sports coaches never achieved greatness in their sports, Tony LaRussa, Tommy Lasorda, Tony Dungy, and Gregg Popovich are championship coaches who had less than illustrious playing careers.  But they are incredibly credible--their authority came from their years of service in coaching.  Typically, they started as assistant coaches, or coaching in high school, in college or the low minor leagues.  The possessed authority—they knew their craft.

2.      Relational ability

I saw a TikTok clip from legendary basketball coach John Wooden the other day.  He recalled attending the press conference when the great Wilt Chamberlain was introduced to the Southern California reporters soon after being traded to the Los Angeles Lakers.  A reporter asked Wilt, “Do you think Lakers coach Bill Van Breda Kolf will be able to handle you?  Some have said you are a difficult player to handle.”  Wooden remembered, “Wilt immediately replied, “No one handles me.  I am not a thing.  You handle things, you work with people.  And I think I can work with just about anyone.”

Wooden admitted that he had just published a book on basketball fundamentals.  There was a chapter on how to handle players.  Wooden said he went home, grabbed the book, crossed out every place he had used the word “handle” and replaced it with “work with.”

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”  That saying is still true, isn’t it? 

My favorite coach in high school was our linebacker’s coach.  He would refer to us as knuckleheads and push us hard--especially in front of the entire team.  But when we were off on our own, he made it crystal clear that he believed in us and really cared.

Some might point to Billy Martin or Bobby Knight as an example of an effective coach who actually never cared for his players.  But the majority of their players would argue that those coaches conveyed true concern.  I suspect that someone who doesn’t really have an ability to relate well is actually more of a short-term consultant than a long-term coach.  Take away that relational component and people don’t listen for very long.

3.     Perspective

Leadership coach Phil Stevenson recently admitted that he actually likes to sit in the middle seat on Southwest Airlines.  He reveals that his middle seat most likely means he got on an earlier flight than he scheduled, and he will get to his destination sooner.  Stevenson writes, “Perspective changes so much. It changes attitudes. It changes perceptions. It changes responses. It changes willingness. It transitions I have to, to I get to. It transforms it’s never me, to why not me? And when your perspective changes, you change.”

Richard Bach quipped, “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

I like Abraham Maslow’s take: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

Charles Thompson added, “Never solve a problem from its original perspective.”

Coaches provide fresh eyes.

Paul Borden says, “An effective pastor knows how to do it one way, an effective coach knows how to do it a hundred ways.”

The best coaches have a broad perspective. 

Superstars don’t often make great coaches, because although they possess credibility, they tend to lack perspective.  Magic Johnson and Ted Williams were poor coaches because they couldn’t understand why their players didn’t just excel like they had in their playing days.

The best coaches have succeeded enough to get people to listen but have also experienced enough to be of help.  They see with new eyes, and from many angles.

4.      Motivation

Job Interviewer: What drives you?

Candidate: The bus mostly.

Interviewer: I mean, what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Candidate: Missing the bus!

The coach’s job is to help the player get to the next level. 

“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.” --Dwight D. Eisenhower

Coaching guru Pat Riley says, “A champion needs a motivation above and beyond winning.”  Good coaches know how to find that, and how to tap into that motivation.

I’m not a Phil Jackson fan, but I always admired his ability to get players--superstars like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant as well as other role players--to push themselves beyond where they’ve been.

The best coaches find a way to push players forward without pushing them away.  Perhaps it is through a system, or a rebuke, or a prayer, or even a question--which leads to the next characteristic:

5.      Listening

Job Interviewer: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

Candidate: "I would say my biggest weakness is listening."

I once hired a coach to help me scale our church planting efforts from thirty new planters a year to one hundred.  He was super relational, highly credible and the definition of motivational—he was an actual substantially successful motivational speaker, who was paid five-figure and more for his talks.

But each coaching session ended with him trying to talk me into becoming a motivational speaker myself.  I’ll admit, I was flattered, and I was tempted, but I had visions of Matt Foley trashing ion my head.  And mostly, that is not what I was asking.  I was asking for help scaling a ministry.

Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say about coaching his players, “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.”

A lot of coaching is refraining from dispensing endless advice and talking about, “How I achieved it” and instead asking the right questions so that the one being coached taps into his or her own potential to make that next step happen.

“Much of the impact of coaching flows from helping people take responsibility to steward their own lives instead of solving their problems for them.” --Tony Stoltzfus, “Leadership Coaching”

When I hear a leader talk about a great coaching appointment, they often mention how their coach asked them a penetrating question that caused the planter to start getting unstuck.

Here are some questions, friends or coaches have used to actually change my life:

Why are you doing that?

Why are you acting out?

Why are you taking rejection so hard?

Why are you letting that person have so much power in your life?

Why are you expecting your parents to act differently than they have acted your entire life?

Why are you not leaving on your own terms?

The simple “GROW” strategy in coaching uses four simple questions in a short coaching appointment:

  What is your Goal?

  What is Reality?

  What are your Options?

  What Will You do now?

Coaching requires listening.  Often times the person being coached does not want to hear how you did it.  Actually, sometimes they do.  Sometimes people need a consultant, or a counselor, or a mentor or even a larger group coaching situation—like a cohort.

Look for a coach who listens enough to be helpful.

The recent college athletics “transfer portal” has caused plenty of issues, disruptions and confusion.  But it does have one great benefit:  It allows players to choose who they want to serve as their coach and who they want to play for.

Let’s duplicate that strength and capitalize on coaching by choosing a coach that works for us.