Excellent, Naked & Calm

On compression, framing and expectation in everyday coaching

Everyday coaching

Development at work can be highly structured.

Induction programmes, competency frameworks, role-plays, coaching models and observation forms can define in considerable detail what someone needs to learn and how their progress will be assessed.

Alongside all of this sit much smaller exchanges: a colleague giving feedback after a customer visit, an experienced manager debriefing someone after their first difficult team conversation, an expert sitting beside a new starter, a team leader adding a line to an observation form.

And then someone writes:

“Excellent. Calm, constructive and complete.”

A surprising amount of development can turn on comments this small.

Excellent: what the words leave out

“Excellent” tells us that the observer had a strong impression of the performance. It tells us much less about what produced it.

What made the interaction complete? Perhaps the person clarified the situation well, brought together several pieces of information before responding, or recognised the point at which enough had been established to move towards a solution. We do not know.

“Excellent” is difficult to reproduce. If the same person struggles in a later interaction, there is little evidence of which capability had previously been strong. If the intention is to reinforce the performance, there is equally little information about what should be repeated.

The judgement may be entirely accurate.

The developmental resolution is low.

Negative feedback can have the same problem in a different form.

“Seemed stressed and confused. Lacked structure.”

There is at least something potentially actionable here. Structure can be worked on. A coach might encourage note-taking, reformulation and a deliberate pause before responding.

But the description still leaves open what actually happened. The person may have started solving before understanding, lost information already provided, struggled to organise several elements of the situation, or found it difficult to manage the conversation while simultaneously working through the problem.

Those possibilities do not necessarily require the same development.

Compare “lacked structure” with an observation that, as more information emerged, the person began moving between questions and possible solutions without first bringing together what had already been established. After taking notes and briefly reformulating their understanding, they regained the structure of the conversation.

The conclusion has barely changed. The developmental information has.

Another coach can now look for the behaviour rather than confirmation of the label. The person receiving the feedback has something they can recognise when it happens again.

If the evidence behind a developmental judgement is absent, what exactly is the next coach being asked to continue: the development, or the label?

The issue becomes more significant when development has to transfer beyond the situation in which the feedback was given.

A salesperson can be told after a customer visit that they should have stayed longer. The advice may be correct. But reproducing it literally would make little sense. The useful learning lies in understanding what happened during that visit that made additional time valuable. Perhaps the conversation moved from general interest towards implementation, or another stakeholder became relevant.

The behaviour is “stay longer”. The capability lies in recognising the conditions under which staying longer creates value.

The same problem appears in management development. “You need to be more assertive” may describe something the observer genuinely noticed. But its developmental value depends on what happened. Did the manager avoid naming an issue? Accept an explanation without exploring it? Leave a decision ambiguous? Or listen carefully and deliberately decide that pushing further at that moment would add little?

Learning a response to one situation is relatively easy. Recognising when the same principle applies in a different customer conversation, management discussion or decision requires access to the reasoning behind it.

Experience tends to compress this reasoning. An experienced practitioner can reach a judgement without consciously reconstructing every cue that contributed to it. That is part of what expertise allows.

When that judgement has to be taught, the compression becomes important.

An experienced salesperson may describe an opportunity as weak and be correct. What the less experienced colleague needs is access to the discriminating cues behind that classification. Without them, the label can be remembered more easily than the reasoning that made the label valid.

If experience arrives as a conclusion without the cues that produced it, what is actually being transferred: judgement, or somebody else's judgement?

Naked: what the words add

What is passed on is not only a reduced version of the reasoning. It can also carry an interpretation.

Someone struggling with a difficult customer conversation might, for example, be encouraged to adopt a more “hypocrito-commercialo” style, a phrase sometimes used informally between colleagues.

Those using it may understand perfectly well what sits behind it. For someone learning the role, its meaning is less stable. It might refer to diplomatic language, positive framing or acknowledging the customer's position before explaining what is possible. It could also be understood more literally as performing an interest or reaction that is not genuinely felt.

The shorthand therefore carries more than a communication technique. It contains an implicit view of what being commercial means.

The same mechanism appears in advice about confidence. Someone intimidated by a senior customer might be told to imagine them naked in the shower because, underneath the title, they are simply another person.

The intention is clear and the technique may work. It creates confidence by mentally reducing the perceived status difference. That is a particular explanation of what is making the situation difficult, and therefore a particular route through it. Confidence could also come from preparation, understanding the other person's context, recognising where one's own role or expertise has value, or becoming more comfortable asking questions when something is unclear.

Small coaching messages can therefore carry both an intervention and an interpretation of the situation that made the intervention seem appropriate.

That interpretation does not arrive neutrally. It comes from someone whose experience is often the reason they have been asked to coach. For someone still learning the role, there may be little reason to separate “this is how my experienced colleague sees the situation” from “this is how this situation should be understood”.

That is one way professional judgement develops. It is also one way assumptions can travel.

Experienced colleagues bring something formal training cannot easily reproduce. Repeated exposure creates pattern recognition. Small signals acquire meaning. Judgements become faster. Situations that appear ambiguous to someone learning a role can look familiar to someone who has encountered variations of them many times before.

But experience does not arrive neatly separated into technique, evidence and interpretation.

It also contains preferred ways of working, accumulated assumptions and shorthand developed inside particular teams. The short judgement “that is a weak opportunity” may represent sophisticated pattern recognition. So might “they aren't ready to manage that yet”. A generalisation about a type of customer, employee or stakeholder may contain some accumulated experience and some overreach. From inside the practice, the distinction can be surprisingly difficult to see.

Once these interpretations become shared language, they can travel further. A description used by one experienced colleague becomes a category used by another. The category begins to organise what gets noticed. New experiences are then interpreted through language that may originally have been little more than somebody's shorthand.

None of this requires anybody to teach an assumption deliberately. Repeated questions can do it just as well.

A sales manager who consistently asks why an opportunity did not close directs attention towards outcome. Another who repeatedly asks what evidence suggested the customer was ready directs attention towards the basis of judgement. A senior manager who repeatedly asks a new manager whether they “held someone accountable” can similarly make one aspect of the management conversation particularly salient. In each case, the questions are also teaching something about what deserves attention.

Praise works similarly. If the “excellent solution” is consistently what receives recognition, the solution becomes salient. Yet the quality of the reasoning that produced it may remain largely invisible.

Someone can reach the right answer through a fragile process. Someone else can reason extremely well in a situation where the outcome available to the customer or employee is disappointing. A salesperson can diagnose an opportunity extremely well and conclude that there is currently very little worth progressing.

Outcome and capability can become compressed into the same judgement.

Calm: what the words expect

Some messages work differently again.

An experienced colleague explains a process, demonstrates a system or walks someone through a task and finishes with:

“It’s easy.”

It may be intended as reassurance. And from the experienced person's perspective, it may be completely true.

But expertise changes the experience of difficulty. Decisions that once required conscious attention become familiar. Several steps are recognised as one pattern. What now feels obvious to the experienced colleague may still consist of multiple unfamiliar decisions for someone encountering it for the first time.

“It’s easy” therefore does more than describe the task. It establishes a reference point for how difficult the task is supposed to feel.

If the learner then struggles, the difficulty has acquired another dimension. Their experience of learning the task now differs from the experienced person's description of how difficult it should be. That gap can begin to say something about how they see their own progress.

The same issue appears in advice such as:

“Just stay calm.”

Calmness may genuinely improve the performance. But calm is the desired state. It does not yet tell us what would make that state possible.

Someone may become unsettled because they are trying to listen, navigate a system and formulate an answer simultaneously. A new manager may lose confidence because a conversation moves somewhere they had not anticipated. A salesperson may begin rushing because an important customer challenges an assumption they had expected to hold.

From the outside, all three may look like a need for greater calm.

From the learner's position, the developmental requirement may be something more specific: a way of reducing the amount being processed at once, a clearer structure for deciding what to do next, permission to pause, or enough practice for some of the work to require less conscious attention.

That distinction matters. “Be calm”, “be confident” and “be more assertive” describe recognisable qualities of effective performance. They can still leave the learner with the responsibility for discovering how to produce them.

And the language surrounding difficulty can influence that process. “It’s easy” can make difficulty feel unexpected. “Just stay calm” can make a visible reaction appear to be the problem when the source of the difficulty sits elsewhere.

What travels

This does not diminish the value of informal coaching. It helps explain why it is so influential.

Workplace development happens partly through participation alongside others. What travels is wider than instruction. It includes what experienced colleagues notice, what they treat as significant, how they classify situations, which explanations they reach for, what they make look easy and what they consider sufficient evidence to act.

Organisations routinely ask experienced performers and managers to take on developmental responsibility precisely because they know the work. That experience is valuable. Yet being able to perform the work and being able to make visible how one has learned to see and perform the work are different capabilities.

The transition between the two can happen with surprisingly little attention. Someone becomes a buddy, an expert, a team leader, a manager of managers or simply the person others increasingly turn to, and the judgements that previously guided their own performance begin shaping somebody else's development.

The responsibility is no longer simply to exercise good judgement. It is also to make that judgement sufficiently visible for somebody else to learn from it without having to inherit every conclusion that came with it.

That makes apparently ordinary words such as “excellent”, “easy” and “calm” worth examining.

Each may be completely reasonable in the moment.

Their developmental significance lies in what becomes possible afterwards: whether someone can recognise what worked, understand what made the situation difficult, see when the same principle applies elsewhere and gradually build judgement of their own.

Alongside that intended learning sits another question that is easier to overlook.

What else has been learned from the way the situation was described?

Developing those who develop others

Experience is one of the strongest resources in workplace learning. Its value increases when trainers, coaches and subject-matter experts can make the judgement behind that experience available to others, while leaving room for learners to develop judgement of their own.

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