One on one, personal relationships are imperative to help people find jobs, learn skills, and excel. The challenge is that in many of our workplaces, employment agencies, entrepreneur shops and incubators, etc. this "high touch" service is being replaced by "high tech"... high tech is necessary, but not sufficient.
From The New Yorker - Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?
"The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. “He never tells you what to do,” another writer said. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”"
No comments:
Post a Comment