PMRN from Coaching Breakfast

Coaching Roundtable – 5th June 2014 HOSTED BY: John Renz, HRD, Novae This coaching roundtable was focused on coaching in practice in organisations, drawing on the recent research report Coaching – Business Essential or Management Fad and the experience of the roundtable participants.

OPENING QUESTIONS •

How can we increase the use of coaching as an integral part of our way of working?

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Use of coaching is integrated into our development activity and we use external coaches, but how can we increase the skill level of our line managers as coaches? How can we embed it? Is accreditation a useful thing and how do evaluate effectiveness?

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We are seeing the use of coaching at key transition points in careers – on arrival into role or organisation or on departure from role or organisation. How can we make this more the ‘norm’?

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What is the role of the external coach and what is their relationship to the sponsoring organisation? Are we clear what coaching is for? There is a risk of coaching occurring in a vacuum so a triangulated relationship is critical (coach; coachee and organisational representative – HR or Line) to ensure a shared agenda

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I am curious about the use of coaching as a tool to support significant change – strategic and cultural - both intellectually and operationally. How do we change the conversations leaders are having in organisations?

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I am interested in coaching capability within the HR function – before we even move to the line managers. We have introduced career coaching conversations for team leaders as this was a significant area of dissatisfaction in our staff survey.

USING EXTERNAL VS INTERNAL COACHES

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Coaching Roundtable – 5th June 2014 One of the key conversations centred on when to develop HR and line coaching capability and when was there a business case to bring in external executive coaches. We explored a case where executive coaching had been explicitly used as to support a strategic shift:

A case study: how Executive Coaching can add value in strategic change The Context: professional services in the financial sector; intellectually rich and organisationally unsophisticated. Exploration of the use of external executive coaching to support leadership change, as distinct from the coaching element of line management The Challenge: In a rapidly changing externally market place, how do we get alignment between personal and organisational goals? How do the senior team effectively role model the change we want to see? How do we support leaders new into these roles to role model whilst on a steep personal learning curve?

We recognise that managing and leading through others is critical to our success and a key differentiator and this is where we have targeted our use of executive coaching. So optimising the performance of the CEO and direct reports and getting alignment amongst the senior leadership cadre. We, of course, still have the ‘mad’ and the ‘bad’, but we are using external coaching less and less for ‘remedial’ work, as this is being tackled by the leaders directly before it gets out of control.

We have used an external organisation to evaluate our use of coaching and 85% - 95% recommendation rates illustrate the value leaders place on this intervention. We got feedback from bosses and direct reports of those who were coached, so the evaluation was not only self-report. I want to stress this does not happen overnight and it has been a three year journey. Selection of coaches has been critical – we have created a virtual community who have high face validity with our leaders. The coaches need to match the leaders sufficiently to build trust – before they earned the right to make the disruptive interventions which might have been necessary.

A by-product of this work is that the business leaders start to see how HR helps to make a real difference to the business. It has helped us to shift the business out of survival into thriving and it has shifted the nature of the conversations which are taking place at the senior levels of our organisation. We are seeing more leadership courage and less tolerance of poor performance or unacceptable behaviour. Getting results by any means is no longer acceptable.

I don’t want to paint Executive Coaching as a magic bullet – the panacea to all organisational ails. We have paid close attention to the cost/benefit of employing an Executive Coach. This has meant facing into ‘incorrect’ selection decisions – when we have put someone into a role

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Coaching Roundtable – 5th June 2014 where they lead people and this is not their forte and they are not motivated to change. This is not where coaching should be used!

Further experience of using Executive Coaches: •

It has helped the unspoken to get spoken – and enabled us to understand our change readiness. It has created psychological safety so that individuals can get past their fear and anxiety during a time of cost cutting and job losses and be willing to explore and understand how this organisation really works. The most toxic environment was low engagement coupled with low turnover and coaching helped our leaders find courage to tackle poor performance more effectively

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It has helped get clear what our recipe for success looks like – what is the culture change we need? It has done this by helping us individually and collectively untangle our values and beliefs from our knowledge and skills and it has highlighted the values in use vs. the espoused values

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It has helped to surface assumptions about models of leadership – particularly where we had a masculine culture. It has enabled us to have a conversation about authenticity and wellbeing. What is the responsibility of leadership – directing vs. enabling?

It was agreed that developing internal coaching capability was important for creating an engaged workforce, but should be seen as an everyday part of the ‘toolkit’ of an effective line manager. There was a recognition that poor internal coaching skills, either within HR or line managers, made effective performance management more difficult. Shifting to a more adult – adult culture, which was the issue for a few organisations, also needed a more coaching style of line management. It was agreed that there was no one size fits all, but a blended approach was usually adopted in most organisations. This involved building day to day internal coaching capability as part of business as usual, and also identifying the conditions for when employing external executive coaches adds particular value. It was recognised that ‘speaking truth to power’ can be difficult for internal coaches and that internal coaches are also part of the culture, so an external perspective might be needed if culture change is on the agenda. © Corporate Research Forum 2014

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Coaching Roundtable – 5th June 2014 THE ‘HOLY GRAIL’ OF EVALUATION – SOME THOUGHTS What is the ‘evidence’ that is useful? Evaluation for what purpose: audit; research or learning? We need both qualitative and quantitative data. The measures of success need to be contextualised – one size does not fit all. How does it link to the business strategy? What are the business outcomes? How can we communicate clear examples of what good looks like? There needs to be a link back to the performance management system and coaching cannot sit in isolation or as pseudo management.

Coming back to where we started – triangulation of outcomes is crucial – there needs to be personal and organisational benefit Karen Ward June 2014

© Corporate Research Forum 2014

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