The CoachAccountable Blog

Over the weekend I met a fellow who gave me a glimpse into a world of coaching that is otherwise quite uncharted by me: internal corporate training.  Now then, the internal workings of a corporate training program may as well be assumed sensitive information, so out of respect for that assumption I’ve altered particulars and paraphrased quotations a bit while still retaining the proper gist.  “Chris” is a senior sales agent, and is responsible for giving training, guidance and evaluation to a rotating cadre of other sales agents in his firm on ongoing basis.  When he asked what I do and I told him of CoachAccountable, it turned out we had a lot to talk about.

“Yeah, I’m coaching a bunch of other sales people at any given time.”  He gave me a rundown of how that coaching is managed, the center of which is a master template Excel spreadsheet that gets filled out whenever he coaches a fellow employee.  I hadn’t seen a ugly spreadsheet masquerading as software since the beloved small e-commerce company I used to work for got acquired by Network Solutions, but sure enough this was such a thing.  It was mainly comprised of few boxes into which hard-to-read notes are typed, a few pull down menus hinting that 5 is swell and 1 is strongly not swell, and a button to “lock this document” that doesn’t work but provides at least the illusion that the content is tamper proof once mutually signed off on.

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