John Whatmore's blog

Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

John Whatmore - 01.01.2012

In a recent edition of the New Yorker, a top-notch surgeon tells about how he came to make use of a coach and what it did for him.

He gives two reasons why he gave thought to the idea of having a coach.

First, by his own metrics he felt that until recently he had been steadily improving; but not lately. And he had wondered whether steady decline was his future, inevitable lot.

Secondly, he was impressed that other people at the top of their tree used coaches: he read about famous football coach Walter Camp, famous Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and Juilliard violin teacher Dorothy DeLay; he spoke to singer Renee Fleming (‘vocalists have voice coaches throughout their careers’) and to violinist Itzak Perlman (whose coach is his wife) and he was impressed by the role of coaches as ‘outside ears and eyes’ (‘what [performers] perceive is often quite different to what audiences perceive’. [Tim Gallwey in ‘The Inner Game of Music’ talks about the primary importance of raising awareness]). And he spoke to Jim Knight, the Director of the Kansas University’s Kansas Coaching Project with its record of enhancing learning through training coaches about the roles that coaches play.

Jim Knight had talked to him about how coaches help people to identify weaknesses - by showing what respected colleagues do, by reviewing videos, or by simple conversation. 

He watched coaches ‘working through the fine points of the observation’ – what went well and what went less well, ‘parcelling out their observations carefully’; and ‘formulating plans for what [a teacher] could practice next’, for example, breaking down contents more, engaging individuals, helping pairs of students to have a useful conversation.

He decided to try a coach. He called a retired surgeon whom we knew well and respected highly.

After the first operation his new coach offered some observations about details, but important details, such as positioning in the operating theatre, about where and how he stood, and about things that he, as pre-occupied by the processes of the surgery, had not been aware of (the operating light drifting out of the wound). He takes the observations of his coach, works on them for a few weeks then gets together with him again. The scope of their work together now extends to the planning of the operation; and he watches other surgeons (and videos of them at work) – some-times surgeons using leading-edge techniques in other fields, in order to gather ideas about what he could do.

He suggests that the benefits of the three or four hours he has spent each month with his coach added more to his capabilities than all of the expenditure that his hospital has made on upgrading surgical equipment. He adds that they could be significantly greater than the costs that result from lower success rates; and he asks why it is that there are so many fields where coaching is unimaginable.

A crucial test of the relationship was one discussion about an operation that did not go well. They started by discussing what had gone well, and then went on to what had not gone so well. They identified a difficulty he had had, what he did about it and what he might have done differently.

He is forced to recognise that the price of making smarter decisions is: exposure; [though there was a recent report of a heart surgeon, who, recognising that only good results were published in medical journals, founded his own group of surgeons (‘Pete’s Club’) who met annually to impart to each other lessons learned from their failures]. 

But to discover that your surgeon has a coach, suggests the author of this article, might not seem to reassure your patients!