A coach is an external set of eyes and ears. They will break down the way you do things and assist with building it up better.
In many disciplines our learning curve rolls over to a plateau as the years pass. Finding ways to continue to improve can be difficult. The traditional, methods of education, formal training, and self directed improvement take significant time investment.
Coaching is not training. Training is pre-constructed material. Coaching is an observation and prescriptive method for improvement.
It’s personal
It’s a whole other level of awareness and the most efficient method of improvement available. Imagine your external eyes and ears providing a more accurate picture of your reality, breaking your actions down and helping to bring them back up again. You should always be on the look out for formal and informal coaches. I can list four I have right now.
- Coaches don’t have to be Guru’s
- They don’t even have to be an expert on the topic
- They just have to be good at observing and diagnosing with a strong understanding of the topic
Coaching relationships is a great way to advance a team without a big financial or time investment for a department. I find this topic to be very important to reliability as a discipline. So few Universities offer formal reliability engineering programs. Most reliability engineers have developed through cobbling together curriculum from different associations, organizations, and individual academic courses.
Share your knowledge and coach others and Look for others who will coach you
-Adam
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