选择职业教练的四大误区

    威廉•崔还记得当年，自己一成为管理顾问就准备把德拉威尔的房子卖掉，把所有东西打包寄存。接下来一段时间，他得满世界飞，房子留着有什么用？

    但他的职业教练劝他不要把所有的东西打包。“她说，‘你需要有一个叫做家的地方，能让你记住自己是谁，’”如今33岁、已是高知特（Cognizant）企业咨询业务高级经理的崔回忆说。“如果一个人总是在旅行，过着大多数人羡慕的、丰富多彩的生活——住着富丽堂皇的酒店，满世界飞，从事着精彩的事业——最后会迷失了自己，我们中的很多人都是这样。”

    崔表示，有一个家总是让他感觉很踏实。在那里他可以打开行李箱，做上一碗面当晚饭，哪怕只是就这样住上一晚，第二天又要出发。这位职业教练在一些更加重大的问题上也给了他很多帮助。最值得一提的是，当他在权衡咨询公司麦肯锡(McKinsey & Co.)和博斯(Booz & Co.)的两份工作机会时，职业教练的辅导让他意识到，从长远看，博斯的导师制会比麦肯锡的自生自灭模式对他更有帮助。

    像崔这样从教练那里寻求一般职业建议（有别于求职辅导）的人并非个别现象。国际教练联合会（International Coaching Federation）的一项调查发现，今年全球职业教练达到了4.75万人，五年前仅3万人。近60%的受访教练表示，过去一年他们的客户数量都出现了上升。

    但随着这个行业快速发展，人们也开始担心，有些教练可能根本就没有必备的资历或经验来真正帮到他们的客户，毕竟这个行业还没有像心理咨询、社会工作、甚至会计行业那样规范。虽然职业教练还不像人生教练那样玄乎，但仍然有可能被滥用，造成伤害，或者干脆就是浪费时间和金钱。

    “很多干这行的人既无经验，也无资历，“组织心理学家、高管教练以及《怪罪游戏》(The Blame Game)一书的作者本•丹特纳说。”他们会培养依赖性，动用…心理技巧赢得客户，但不能提供任何实质性的帮助。“

    鉴于职业培训已经被吹上了天，我们现在得仔细看看选择职业教练的四大陷阱：

辅导目标不明确

    为什么要请一位职业教练、或通常所称的“高管教练”？这一点至关重要。或许你觉得自己陷入了职业困境，需要帮助才能到达下一个层面，或许你正在考虑要不要改变职业道路。或许你正在应对某一项具体的挑战，可能是一项新的领导职务，也可能是一项你还没有完全掌握的技能。

    “开始接受辅导，很重要的一点是要清楚为什么要辅导，”安永（Ernst & Young）常驻科罗拉多州丹佛的美洲职业辅导负责人詹尼斯•史密斯说。

    When William Cui first became a management consultant, he was ready to sell his home in Delaware and put all his belongings in storage. No use owning property when he'd be traveling all over the world for the foreseeable future, right?

    But his career coach stopped him from packing everything away. "She said, 'You need to have somewhere to call home to tie you back to who you are,' " recalls Cui, who is now 33 and a senior manager in Cognizant's business consulting practice. "When you're traveling and living an interesting life that most people would be jealous of -- you're living in fancy hotels, traveling around the world, and doing exciting things -- a lot of us end up losing ourselves."

    Cui says he has remained grounded by having a home where he could unpack his suitcase and make a bowl of noodles for dinner, even just for an overnight between trips. And his career coach has helped him with much bigger issues as well, most notably when he was weighing job offers from consulting firms McKinsey & Co. and Booz & Co. With her coaching, he realized the mentoring at Booz rather than the sink-or-swim McKinsey model would help him more in the long-run.

    Cui is hardly alone in relying on a coach for general career advice, as distinct from help with job hunting. A survey by the International Coaching Federation found that there were 47,500 professional coaches worldwide this year, up from 30,000 just five years ago. And nearly 60% of coaches surveyed said they'd experienced an increase in clients during the previous year.

    But as the industry has grown, so have concerns that some coaches don't have the credentials or experience needed to truly help their clients, given that the profession isn't regulated in the way that psychology, social work, or even accounting are. Career coaching may not be quite as prone to hucksters as life coaching is, but there's still the potential for exploitation, harm, or simply a waste of time and money.

    "There are a lot of people out there who are doing it without experience or credentials," says Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist, executive coach, and author of The Blame Game. "They're cultivating dependency and using … mind tricks to win and get clients without actually helping."

    Given the hype surrounding coaching, it seems an opportune time to look closely at four big pitfalls of career coaches:

You don't have a "coachable issue"

    It's critical to know why you are working with a career coach, often called an executive coach. Perhaps you feel stuck in your career and need help getting to the next level -- or maybe you are deciding whether to change course. You might be dealing with a specific challenge, whether it's a new leadership role or a skill that you haven't quite mastered.

    "Coming into a coaching relationship, it's so important to be clear about why you're there," says Janice Smith, Ernst & Young's Americas coaching leader, based in Denver, Co.