What makes a great coach, great?

Is it the results they produce?

Is it the long list of testimonials?

Is it the flashy credentials?

Is it the number of coaching hours they've logged?

Is it simply their corporate pedigree?

Ask that question in a room of ten coaching providers and you'll get ten confident answers, no two alike. The industry is divided so deeply that nobody will give you a straight reply. And almost nobody notices the thing those five questions have in common: every marker on that list describes the coach. Not one of them tells you whether the coach fit the person sitting across the table.

I learned that difference the hard way.

The story I used to tell as a joke

Circa 2018, I was the problematic employee. The one who wanted answers to questions other people never dared to ask, the questions the organisation had quietly agreed to walk around. I didn't raise my voice. I raised my hand. That was enough to earn the label.

My problematic behaviour also earned me an introduction to a coach. The timing was almost funny. By the time that first session was booked, I had already decided to put in my papers. I just hadn't said it out loud yet.

Here is what happened, in the order it happened.

The coach got paid.

My resignation was accepted.

My manager started looking for a replacement.

And the organisation remained none the wiser.

For years I told that as a story about a company that didn't listen. It isn't. It's the cleanest example I have of the one mistake I now spend my days trying to end.

I want to be fair to the coach in that room. She was good. She asked careful questions. She named one or two things about me that were accurate and that I hadn't said to anyone. None of it mattered, because the brief was wrong before the first question landed. She had been handed a person to settle, not a problem to read. The best coaching in the world, pointed at the wrong target, still misses.

The mistake has a name

Somebody chose the help before anyone diagnosed the problem. A coach was brought in, credentialed and experienced and well reviewed, with every marker from that opening list intact, to fix something nobody had bothered to name. In my case the "something" wasn't even mine to fix. I was asking the questions the system didn't want asked. The coaching wasn't there to help me think. It was there to make a problem go quiet.

We call that the Blind Match: choosing the coach before diagnosing what is actually wrong. A credential, a chemistry call, a friendly internal mentor. Three different doors, the same single error. The match is made blind, and when it misses, nobody can even say why, because there was never a diagnosis to check the coach against.

The research is older than the people still making the mistake

Meryl Louis (1980) studied what happens to people in the early weeks of an unfamiliar role and found something uncomfortable. We keep making sense of the new through the frame of the old. We don't do it carelessly. We do it with confidence.

My organisation read me through a frame it already had. Difficult. Resistant. A retention risk. And it never updated that frame. A leader who keeps asking "why do we do it this way?" looks, through that old lens, exactly like a problem to be removed. Same behaviour, opposite reading. Nobody ran the diagnosis that would have told them which one they were actually looking at. They reached for a coach instead, because reaching for a coach felt like doing something.

Why this matters to the person buying the coaching

Go back to the opening list. Results, testimonials, credentials, hours, corporate pedigree. Every item is a fact about the coach. Not one of them tells you whether that coach can hold the specific person, stuck in the specific way, sitting in front of them right now.

And a five-star coach matched to the wrong problem does not stay neutral. They make it worse. Warmth poured on a leader who is confidently running the wrong playbook only reinforces the playbook. The kinder the coach, the deeper the leader digs.

So the honest answer to "what makes a great coach great" is uncomfortable for an industry that sells on bios. Greatness isn't a fixed property of the coach at all. It's a property of the match.

That is why our research team built CRAFT, a way to name which of five places a leader is actually stuck: how they Commit, Relate, Act, Feel, or Think their way into a bigger role. And it's why I built ECCM, the model I use to score whether a given coach has the capability that specific pattern demands. Seven dimensions, anchored in behaviour you can observe rather than charisma you can feel, with two non-negotiable gates that rule a coach out no matter how impressive the rest of the profile reads. Diagnosis first. Capability second. Chemistry, the thing most matching starts with, comes last.

Let me be straight about the limit. I am not claiming our matched leaders outperform yours. The work that proves that is still ahead of us. What I am claiming is the order of operations: name the problem, then choose the help. The reverse, the Blind Match, is the most expensive habit in this industry precisely because it is invisible. It costs you a leader and a coaching fee, and it never sends you the bill with a reason written on it.

The question I'd leave you with

In 2018, the company paid for a coach, accepted my resignation, backfilled my role, and learned nothing. Not because the coach was weak. Because no one ever asked the only question that would have changed the ending. Not "is this a good coach?" but "good at what, for whom?"

You can usually see that a leader is stuck.

The meetings get a little quieter.
The decisions sit longer than they should.
The confident hire from the interview slowly stops asking for anything at all.

The harder question is the one I'd put to you before you sign off on the next coach: can you say which of the five they're caught in, before you choose who you send in to help?

Because the coach you pick can only ever be as good as the problem you named first.

P.S. BQ's work ensures that you are aking yourself the right questions, everytime.