Wendy Rhoades, Axe Capital and the coaching industry

Thoughts from a behaviour analyst

Anyone who has watched Billions, you will remember Wendy Rhoades. She is the performance coach who does not pretend to be a small independent emotional refuge in the middle of a brutal corporate world.
Axe Capital pays her. Her job is to pick people up from the floor, get them back into performance, and help them think towards the target.
At least that is clean.
I came across a post today about what it means to coach someone at work, and what it says about organisational culture if a person finds it easier to open up to AI than to their own manager.

I would split this coaching thing in two.
One version is the beautifully written theory: safe space, non-judgemental attention, growth, self-awareness. It sounds good. It just struggles with real workplace reality.
Or is the tune not usually played for the person who pays the musician?
The other version faces this more honestly. Wendy Rhoades is the good example. The firm pays her to put people back into performance. Everyone knows what they are walking into that room for. No smoke and mirrors.
Compared with that, the workplace coaching industry sometimes performs a strange little trick.
It wants to be safe space, independent human attention, self-awareness process and performance support at the same time. Beautifully put. Except we are still sitting in the same organisation where pay, promotion, performance, loyalty and exit are also decided.

And we have not even opened the other layers of awareness yet: bias, deep habits, organisational loyalty, or the very human question of whether I want to be the one who says that someone may have to leave the company.
AI has no Monday morning memory in the team. It will not assign tasks, sit in the next meeting, write my performance review, or look at me strangely the next time salary comes up.
That does not make it a certified coach, of course. But it may explain why it is sometimes easier to say something to a machine than to a person whose salary may also be decided at the same table as mine.
Heaven forbid, their performance may even be monitored too.
The more I think about it, the more the onion layers of contradiction start to open.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, there is still something to think about here: how long can we maintain the appearance that workplace coaching is independent human attention, when the same organisation pays and evaluates the coach, and then also decides the coached person’s pay, performance and future?

Photo by Milan Czar on Unsplash