Define "coach" for me.
Go on. Try.
Merriam-Webster hands you a large, closed, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage with a raised seat in front for the driver. Keep reading and a coach becomes a railway car, then the cheap seats on a flight, then a private tutor, then a verb - to coach. Noun and verb, vehicle and person, all stuffed into the same five letters.
The International Coaching Federation does no better. It defines coaching as "partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential." Read that twice and tell me what a coach actually does on a Tuesday.
The further down the rabbit hole you go, the blurrier it gets, until the word means everything and therefore nothing.
So I'll say the quiet part out loud. To this day I cannot give you a clean definition of who a coach is. And that absence - that missing line in the sand - is my real problem with this industry.
There is no boundary. No register. No exam you can fail. Nothing on earth stops anyone from printing "coach" on a business card tomorrow afternoon. A sixteen-year-old who captained the under-16s can call himself a leadership coach, and somewhere, someone will hire him. The same noun that carries Patrick Sang carries him too. That should bother you more than it does.
Where the word still means something
Here's where I've landed: the only place "coach" has kept its weight is sport.
Patrick Sang coaches Eliud Kipchoge - the first human to run a marathon in under two hours, twice an Olympic champion. Before Sang coached, Sang ran: three global silver medals in the steeplechase, one of them at the 1992 Olympics. He never ran Kipchoge's event, and he has certainly never run Kipchoge's race for him. But he has spent his entire life inside that world. He knows what the wall feels like at the 35th kilometre. He knows what altitude does to a training week and what a taper costs the mind. He understands the terrain.
That is precisely the thing the corporate coaching world has talked itself out of needing.
The "beginner's mind" excuse
The fashionable belief is that a coach is better off knowing nothing about your world. No background, the theory goes, keeps the coach curious, open, unbiased - a clean mirror you get to think in front of.
I think that's woo-woo dressed up as wisdom.
There's a real distinction buried underneath it, and the industry collapses it on purpose. Not knowing the person is healthy - you should stay endlessly curious about the human in front of you, concede what you don't understand, let them show you. But not knowing the terrain is disqualifying. A coach who can't read the world a senior leader operates in - the board politics, the P&L pressure, what it actually means to inherit a function in your first quarter - isn't curious. They're lost. And a lost coach asks beautiful questions that change nothing.
Let me tell on myself. I could not coach a marathoner. I've never run a kilometre I wasn't being chased over. I'd ask lovely, well-formed questions and quietly waste an athlete's entire season. Curious about the person, ignorant of the terrain - that isn't neutrality. It's a liability with good eye contact.
Why I built a gate for exactly this
When I built ECCM - the model I use to score whether a coach can actually hold a specific leader - I refused to leave contextual understanding to vibes. It's one of seven dimensions, and one of only two I made a gate. Score low on Contextual Integration and you're out: however warm you are, however clean your questions, however long your list of testimonials. The other gate is the working relationship itself. Miss either one and nothing else on the profile can buy you back in.
I'm not claiming a coach must have done the leader's exact job - Sang never ran a marathon. I'm claiming they have to understand the world that job lives in well enough to read it correctly before they open their mouth. Business acumen isn't a contaminant that spoils a coach's precious neutrality. For a senior leader, it's the cover charge. It's the price of being allowed in the room.
The question I'd leave you with
Most coach-matching skips all of this. It matches on chemistry, on who's free this month, on a credential that certifies the coach was trained - never on whether this particular coach can read your particular world. That's the mistake I spend my days trying to end: choosing the help before anyone has checked whether the helper understands the terrain.
So the next time someone offers you a coach, don't open with "are they certified?" or "did we click on the call?" Open with the harder question:
Do they actually understand the world I'm about to send them into - or am I being asked to pay someone to ask my most expensive leader beautiful questions about a place they have never been?
Define "coach" for me. I still can't, not cleanly. But I can tell you the very first thing I'd check before I let one anywhere near someone who matters.
P.S. The sixteen-year-old will be fine. He'll grow up, lead something real, hit a wall at his own 35th kilometre - and on the far side of it he might finally have something worth coaching. Background was never snobbery. It's just the difference between having been there and having read the brochure.