One of the questions I’ve learned to ask as a coach before giving anyone feedback about their ideas, content, delivery, or performance in general is, “How do you want your feedback – should I give it to you straight, or sugar-coat it?”  Now, everyone always says, “Give it to me straight!” but it’s the way they say it that tells me what I need to know.  Their body language and tone of voice indicate whether they can truly take straightforward advice at that point, or whether they need the classic advice sandwich with a gentle wrapping of delicious home-made honey oat bread carefully swaddling the ‘meat’ inside.

Very, very few people truly want straightforward advice.  In fact, the few people who have made me believe that’s indeed what they want have gone on to very successful speaking careers.  So have some of the methinks-they-protesteth-too-much sugar coaters, of course. but it’s the clients who asked for and received blunt talk that in general have moved the fastest.

Come to think of it, the one person – one! – in 25 years who said, “I want some sugar-coating,” also has gone on to a stellar career.  Maybe he was just as self-aware as the tougher cookies.  Is self-awareness perhaps the key for getting the most out of a coach?

Now a recent study reveals that I’ve been asking the wrong question after all these years.  I should have asked something along the lines of “what kind of speaker would you like to become?”  Asking someone about their ideal self apparently helps people feel better about themselves and become more open to new ideas.  If you base your coaching on the real person in front of you, and their current problems, then your coachee becomes defensive and self-critical.  Brain scans indeed show the brains of the recipients of advice reacting in these two very disparate ways.

This insight comports with all the research over the years which shows that people basically don’t like feedback – and they don’t want either to receive it or give it.  The result is that feedback sandwich I alluded to earlier, which is sometimes so bread-heavy and meat-light that the recipient misses out on the important middle bit altogether.  Worse than that, I’ve been brought into executive teams in various organization where the whole point is to deliver some bad news to one particular executive – and the work gets wrapped elaborately in a large project in order to conceal its real purpose.  Indeed, one such organization threw a group of employees into a training seminar that was billed as personal development, but turned out to be the last guilt-induced nice thing the company was doing for these unwitting employees before they got laid off.  I was mortified when I learned what was really going on behind the scenes – but of course it was too late.

My anecdotal research working in various other countries over the years suggest that this may be a peculiarly American problem.  The English are blunter by half than Americans in a typical business setting, despite the cultural stereotype that the British are too polite to give direct feedback.  And the Dutch and Germans are blunter still.  The French too, though perhaps not quite as much.  Do these apparent cultural differences mean that their brains respond differently to feedback than American brains?  We want more research!

All of which leads me to believe that the real work of coaching is to give advice to one person at a time in a way that is uniquely suited for that individual to hear.  It’s the work of a lifetime, and there is always something to learn and ways to improve.  Every coach needs to have a bag of tools that offers many ways to accomplish the same task, like having a hundred wrenches to tighten various bolts in just the right ways.  You need to understand your craft, of course, and you need to make the infinite varieties of human nature your lifetime study.  Then be prepared to put the two together in creative ways.  That’s all there is to it.