A recent article in Chief Learning Officer discusses the merits of a coaching approach to tapping leadership potential.  The article focuses mainly on how to reach a desired change in leadership through the use of coaching.  The author points out that there are necessary factors in producing lasting change which are: desire, understanding, commitment, support, being open to feedback, and follow-up. I would argue that another substantial piece to this coaching puzzle is matching coaches to the appropriate leader.  In sports, you wouldn't want the volleyball coach to step in for the soccer coach.  The basketball coach and the cheerleading coach will obviously have different experiences and talents to draw upon in their coaching.  The person being coach knows whether or not their coach has significant advice, encouragement, and skills to relate.  In essence, it is vital to make sure that your coach has played this particular game before and has something concrete to offer. In education schools often promote the idea of mentoring for younger teachers.  I believe that this approach and the coaching approach are similar in that they use experienced individuals to advise those with less experience.  Here's the rub, in my experience I was never paired up with a coach that had legitimate playing experience in my sport.  As a foreign language teacher, I was paired with a special education teacher, a librarian, and technology teacher.  Now all of those educators were plenty smart and had years of valuable experience but they couldn't offer me one word of advice on how to teach a foreign language to a room full of kids.(Of course, that didn't stop them from offering useless advice.)  They were trying to coach the wrong sport.  I eventually sought out the advice I needed but not after feeling slightly resentful of those who seemed to just be pretending to know more than me.