“John. He’s a nightmare. Never before have I met someone
who suffers more acutely from SOS: Shiny Object Syndrome. He’s
so scattered that it’s like working with confetti.”
“What? No! Tell me more,” you encourage.
“And that’s just the start of it. He has a very slippery
relationship with truth and reality. It’s not that he’s lying exactly.
It’s just that the boundary between truth and not-truth are, well,
there isn’t one.”
“O.M.G. And what else?”
“Ha! Did I tell you about the time when he...”
And so it goes. A solid forty-five minutes talking about John.
And no doubt it’s a thoroughly entertaining conversation, at the
end of which you both feel much better thanks to your inherent
superiority over John and all his many flaws. And you feel like
you’ve done some good coaching, because not only were you
actively listening the whole time but you also bonded deeply.
This, however, is not coaching. Or managing. It’s gossiping. Or,
more bluntly, bitching and moaning.
The key thing to know here is that you can coach only the
person in front of you. As tempting as it is to talk about a “third
point” (most commonly another person, but it can also be a
project or a situation), you need to uncover the challenge for the
person to whom you’re talking. So in the example above, it
becomes a coaching conversation when it’s a conversation about
how this person is managing John, not a conversation about John.
And asking the Focus Question—“So what’s the real challenge