by Design
And Nothing Changed.
I Said the Right Thing. And Nothing Changed.
You coached the way you were taught. You said the right thing. And the person in front of you didn’t change. That isn’t a coaching failure. It’s a diagnosis problem, and this book is about solving it: before you coach the behavior, understand what’s driving it.
by Mike Browne
Diagnose before you prescribe.
A belief problem looks like a skill problem. A strategy problem looks like an attitude problem. Leaders keep prescribing the wrong fix, not because they lack skill, but because nothing in their training taught them to diagnose first.
Believe
See the person in front of you.
Look past the behavior to what’s really driving it. Every person brings something no one else has, and the leader who can see it can coach to it.
Understand
Find the real problem.
Belief, skill or strategy? From across the desk each one looks like the others, and each one needs a different conversation.
Decide
Choose your move.
Decide what to do with what you now see. The right words only work once the diagnosis is right.
James
Guests trusted James immediately. His effort was visible. His results were volatile.
His leader coached closing technique, activity, pipeline. James nodded, agreed, and left with a plan. The same pattern came back.
The leader was coaching the right person in the wrong layer.
At the moment of asking a guest to commit, James softened. Closing felt like a violation of the trust he had built.
If he never fully asked, he could never fully be rejected.
The coaching move that changed everything wasn’t a directive. It was patience.
The leader held the diagnosis and didn’t deliver it. James named the root cause himself the next morning. Within a week he was asking every guest to commit. The ask had become the deepest expression of care he could offer.
For the leader who wants more than the book.
Design to Coach puts the book’s method to work on your own team. You sit down with Silas, a coach, and have one conversation about one person, told the way you’d tell a colleague.
- 1
One conversation about one person
Tell Silas about them the way you’d tell a colleague. He listens, asks what he needs to know, and coaches you from there.
- 2
The two surveys
How each person likes a conversation to feel, and what drives them. Yours too.
- 3
Silas in the room
He gets you ready for each one-on-one, and talks it through with you.
Want it for your leaders? Ask about Design to Coach More about it →
Mike Browne
Mike Browne didn’t write this book to advance his career. He wrote it because years of leading sales teams made one thing impossible to ignore: somewhere between the pipeline reviews and the performance numbers, the person sitting across from the leader got lost.
He has led sales teams for nearly two decades, at Disney, Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt and Wyndham. The method in this book was built on the floor: in one-on-ones that weren’t working, in conversations where he said the right thing and nothing changed, and in the slow recognition that most coaching fails not because the leader lacks skill, but because the leader is solving the wrong problem.
“I know I see this person clearly, and I know exactly how to meet them where they are.”
Mike Browne
Coach by Design™ is the first book in a four-part series.
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