Coaching

Well, life at work began today as I expected. Explaining again to The Student what I had explained to him yesterday. Now when it came to discussing exactly what he was to do, I told him exactly what to do. This was because his favourite answer to why he hadn't done something the right way is always "But you never told me do it that way". You see, I do like to leave some room for the guy to grow, to be creative and to come up with a solution himself. I'm a firm believer in explaining what the problem is as opposed to explaining the solution. At least this was, he has to try to think. The academics would call it "coaching". I guide The Student into finding the solution himself. Or something like that.

So, today I explained what he had to do. It seemed much safer. I wanted him to make the same changes to File B that he did to File R yesterday. This basically involved adding a section to it. Now the 2 files are very similar but have their differences.

"Okay" I began, "add that section to File B and we'll do the testing".

"Ah no. I want to copy File R over File B. It's quicker" he said.

"But File B is supposed to be different to File R. You can't do that!"

"It's okay. I'll make the small differences to File B afterwards. Sure they're much the same files anyhow".

"Well how do you know what changes you have to make (that make File B different from File R)?".

"It's obvious".

"How is it obvious?".

"I know how they're different cos they're much the same anyhow".

There is a sort of logic to this to be fair but it escaped me at the time.

"But what if you forget to make some changes or get some wrong? You're running the risk of breaking something that's already working".

"I won't, trust me".

So, to cut a long story short, I decided he could do it his way as he convinced me/himself it would be quicker for him and he wouldn't get it wrong. Ahhh, I bet you think I'm setting myself up for a fall, eh? Well, you'd be wrong. He sloped back to me about 30 minutes later to say he was gonna do it that way I suggested. He claimed that I'd blame him if he got something wrong doing it his way. Well duh! Of course I would. It's accountability. If you're responsible for making the changes, you're accountable for them not working. I guess he was thinking that if he did it my way and it went wrong, well it wouldn't be his fault, it'd be mine cos that's what I'd told him do. Then he could claim that if he had done it his way after all, it would've worked. Don't think I didn't see that. There was also the little issue of him realising that those "small differences" weren't that small after all and that he didn't know all of them. Of course I knew that too.

This was a brilliant example of coaching. He was led to believe that he had all the options and that the decisions he made were his own. That's kinda true. He ended up doing it the way I wanted but thought it was his choice, his decision. I'm brilliant, me.