Some weeks ago I engaged in a nice conversation with Stephen Parry and Tonianne DeMaria Barry about coaches and how they could harm the organization.

They came up with an interesting perspective. In their opinion, central teams consisting of coaches are quite harmful for the organization.

Stephen defends they (coaches) will perpetuate themselves making everyone dependent on them.

This has a huge impact on the organization. According to him, this creates a clear statement that coaches are the only ones responsible for improvement. Other people outside of a team will not make any efforts to improve anything because it is simply not their job. This will create a culture where continuous improvement job belongs just to a few pre-selected people who work in that particular team.

Honestly, when I saw these statements I was a bit confused. I am a coach myself and I belonged to one of such teams in past. If I look back, I believe I am highly respected by everyone whom I worked with, however, I understand the point of Stephen´s and Tonianna´s view. Having central coaches, team members have someone to take care of the continuous improvement. Therefore, they do not care much, they know they have coaches to help them and at the end of the day it is not their job. So why to bother?

Another thing I realised is that if you belong to a central group, you cannot focus on one single team/organization. There is simply too much stuff to do and at the end you cannot help everyone. If you belong to a vertical organization, you can help that organization or focus on one or two teams. You can show everyone that continuous improvement is a job for everyone not just for coaches.

And let´s be honest… We as coaches, we always teach and preach to everyone that we need cross functional teams. So why to create a central team only with coaches? What sense does it make?