How to Get The Right People on Your Coaching Bus

How to Get The Right People on Your Coaching Bus

There’s a great book called “Good to Great” by Jim Collins that I read many years ago, which talks about companies that leapt from being good (in line with their peers) to great (outperforming their peers in financial terms). It’s a fascinating book that challenges many conventional wisdoms about what makes companies great. One of these ideas is “get the wrong people off the bus” and “get the right people on the bus”.

Jim explains that companies that genuinely became great recruited very well. They ensured they had the best people on board and were willing to let go of performers in their business who weren’t a 100% great fit.

As coaches, we can use this idea of getting the right coaching clients on board.

Here’s how:

It’s not enough to have excellent coaching skills; if you want to be a great coach, you have to get the right people on the bus, i.e. have great clients and be willing to let go of the clients who are not so committed to the process.

Over the years, when working with a client that wasn’t an excellent fit for me, has utilised more energy than all of my other clients put together. This is why I’m so careful about who I take on as a coach.

Now if you’re starting out, you might not be able to be so picky because:

  1. You don’t have the demand for your work and
  2. You’re not 100% sure what a great fit looks like. This tends to evolve over time.

At whatever stage of your coaching practice, a great way to start having better clients is, rather than thinking about their background, demographic or work status, to think about their attributes.

For example, do you prefer clients who are open and coachable? Or would you like someone a bit more of a challenge? I remember speaking to a great coach, Cheryl Bond, who said her favourite clients were the ones nobody else wanted to coach.

Do you like working with people who are leaders and visionaries or someone who is a doer? Do you prefer working with people who want to have a lot of contact with you? Or people who tend to do things independently and need little hand-holding?

The other thing you can do is think about the attributes you don’t like in clients.

Coaches come up with this quite quickly. To think about who the right people on the bus would be, just turn those around. If the attributes you dislike in a potential client are that they’re not on time, they don’t have integrity; they’re not open and coachable. Just turn that around, and you now describe the client you want.

To create this in your business, start communicating that, put it on your website, talk about it on your social media, and in your conversations with people. The more you speak that into the world, the more you’ll find that you’re creating this in your coaching practice.

Suppose you want to dive deeper into becoming a professional coach and continue your professional education. In that case, I recommend watching the interview I had with the one and only grandfather of coaching, Steve Chandler, who is also part of the faculty in my AJC Coaching Career School 2023. Click below for the interview.

With love and appreciation,
Ankush Jain
Coach and Author of Sweet Sharing – Rediscovering the REAL You

 

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2 thoughts on “How to Get The Right People on Your Coaching Bus”

  1. Ankush, team, hope you guys see this.

    When clicking on the picture to open the conversation with Steve Chandler, the website url is wrongly configured. It misses a “:” after “https”. Minor mistake, and easy to work around but only if you know what you are looking at.

    Hope this helps, cheers

    Reply

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