Leaders today are caught in times of unprecedented organizational change and complexity.
Whether their focus is on bottom-line results, cost reductions, change efforts, globalization or IT – the pressures are immense. Leaders are dealing with loss of employee and public trust, the loss of valuable talent, all while expected to do more with less. In the midst of all this, they are also expected to be proactive in developing their abilities and to recognize the importance of developing the people around them.
Coaching is not a last ditch effort to “fix” someone or a focus only on life issues. It’s about leaders having an impact and producing results. It’s about building leadership capacity and improving how a leader functions within your environment. Coaching should incorporate stakeholder feedback, align leaders with development objectives and hold them accountable for their development, while measuring progress throughout the engagement. In the end, coaching should help develop effective leaders that will create a winning culture within your organization.
A recent Harvard Business Review research report found that most coaching engagements fall into two categories: developing the capabilities of high-potential leaders or facilitating a transition. This demonstrates that coaching today is less about fixing problem behaviors and more about enhancing the performance of valued executives. Other key areas of the coaching engagement include:
* Facilitating a transition
* Developing capabilities of a high-potential manager
* Acting as sounding board on organizational dynamics
* Enhancing the interactions of a team
* Addressing a “derailing” behavior
* Act as sounding board on strategic matters
The HBR report stated that executives who are willing to learn and evolve and who can actively engage in the coaching process have the best results. Leaders with significant character flaws or deep-seated behavioral problems are poor coaching candidates. People suffering from deep resentment, severe narcissism, ironclad beliefs, or a victim mentality are usually unwilling to look inwards and are therefore unlikely to benefit from coaching. Success of the coaching engagement depended on the quality of the relationship between coach and leader. Further, the support of the company was also deemed very critical. Firms must be committed to the leader and his or her progress, and senior management needs to be invested in the engagement.
There are two basic rules for hiring a coach. First, make sure that the executive is ready and willing to be coached. Second, allow the executive to choose whom he or she wants to work with, regardless of who in the organization initiated the engagement.
Organizations should also take into account whether the coach has a clear methodology.
Different coaches value different methodologies. Some coaches begin with 360-degree feedback, for example, while others rely more on psychological feedback and in-depth interviews. From an organization’s perspective, methodology is a good way to winnow the pile. If a prospective coach can’t tell you exactly what methodology he uses – what he does and what outcomes you can expect – show him the door. Top business coaches are as clear about what they don’t do as about what they can deliver. For example, a good coach will be able to tell you up front whether or not she is willing to serve as a sounding board on strategic matters.
All coaches recognize that they should be making you more competent and self-reliant. If the coaching relationship isn’t doing that, it’s very likely that you’re becoming overly dependent. Dependence isn’t always bad, of course – friends relying on one another, for example, is a good thing. But we all know people who can’t make a decision without first talking to their psychotherapists, and some executives defer to their coaches in the same way. They have conversations with the coach that they ought to be having with other executives in the C-suite or with their teams.
Coaches have an economic incentive to ignore the problem of dependency, creating a potential conflict of interest. It’s natural for them to want to expand their business, but the best coaches, like the best therapists, put their clients’ interests first. Harry Levinson, the father of coaching, worked with the top executives of his day. He said that if a coach wasn’t aware of the dependency dynamic, then he had no right to be a coach. What this means for you is that before you hire a coach, you should ask her how she handles dependency in relationships.
Coaches can also be very lax in evaluating the impact of their work and communicating results to executives and stakeholders. While it can be difficult to draw explicit links between coaching intervention and an executive’s performance, it is certainly not difficult to obtain basic information about improvements in that executive’s managerial behaviors. Coaching is a time-intensive and expensive engagement, and organizations that hire coaches should insist on getting regular and formal progress reviews, even if they are only qualitative or anecdotal.
There’s no question that future leaders will need constant coaching. As the business environment becomes more complex, they will increasingly turn to coaches for help in understanding how to act. These coaches will do more than influence behaviors; they will be an essential part of the leader’s learning process, providing knowledge, opinions, and judgment in critical areas.
