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Special supplement | Volume 03 | Issue 03 2009
EFMD
Special supplement
The role of corporate coaching in business Findings from a collaboration between EFMD and EMCC
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009
Corporate coaching: the importance of mentoring and coaching
Welcome to this special issue of Global Focus on corporate coaching. It is part of a wider collaboration between EFMD and EMCC, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, in understanding and disseminating good practice in this powerful area of people development.
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key element in this publication is the results from a joint survey establishing how and to what extent European companies are using internal resources for coaching and mentoring. The set of expert articles gives an additional insight into more specific areas such as executive coaching, coaching strategies and team coaching. For many years, EFMD has been working on corporate coaching through surveys, case writing, dedicated task forces and advisory seminars, and it will continue to do so. The importance of coaching and mentoring for managers, leaders and organisations will continue to grow and while organisations have put much more thought and effort into the management of mentoring and coaching, there is still room for improvement in harnessing the power of both approaches effectively. Eric Cornuel EFMD Director General
in-company coaching: a development process that focuses on the management of performance
EFMD Global Focus | Volume 03 | Issue 03 2009
in-company mentoring: a one-to-one developmental process that focuses on the development of capability and effective career management
There is still room for improvement in harnessing the power of management coaching and mentoring
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009
The use of internal resources for coaching and mentoring
David Clutterbuck reports on the results of an EFMD/ European Mentoring and Coaching Council survey into how companies use coaching and mentoring
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n-company coaching and mentoring have become part of the fabric of organisational development in recent years. But what are companies using them for and how effective are they? EFMD and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council have co-operated in a survey to find out.
Based on responses from 173 HR professionals responsible for managing coaching and mentoring, the survey data suggest that while organisations are experiencing substantial benefits from their investments in this area, in-company coaching and mentoring is still a “work in progress”. For the purposes of the survey, we used definitions that were acceptable to a panel of advisers in the specific context of internal company provision. This allowed us to avoid confusion over terms such as career coaching. Our definitions were: · in-company coaching: a development process that focuses on the management of performance · in-company mentoring: a one-to-one developmental process that focuses on the development of capability and effective career management We also asked respondents for their own definitions of the differences between developmental coaching and developmental mentoring. While there was a rich and wide variety of opinion, the most commonly mentioned distinctions are that there is a higher level of challenge expected in the coaching relationship and that mentoring tends to be longer term and involve a partnership between a more junior and a more senior employee. The overall impression is nonetheless one of lack of clarity about where and how the two approaches co-exist. Although they have much in common, coaching and mentoring seem to be managed as separate activities in most organisations. They are also at different stages in terms of how well they are managed. Our survey suggests that coaching and mentoring are only just emerging from an ad hoc, reactive phase into more systematic approaches. So what did we find? Both coaching and mentoring are provided for a wide range of employees, from the shop floor to the executive suite. But the concentration of in-company coaching is heavily on middle managers and executives, followed at a much lower level by the talent pool and professional staff.
173 ...HR professionals took part in the EFMD and EMCC survey
80% ...of respondents saw coaching as effective or very effective for executives, middle managers, junior managers and the talent pool
50% ... nearly half of respondents said their organisations directed mentoring programmes at female employees and junior managers
EFMD Global Focus | Volume 03 | Issue 03 2008 2009
However, there was a much more even perception of the effectiveness of coaching. Over 80% of respondents to this question saw it as effective or very effective for executives, middle managers, junior managers and the talent pool. Mentoring is most commonly targeted at new recruits, followed by middle managers and professional specialists. Nearly half of respondents said their organisations directed mentoring programmes at female employees and junior managers. The talent pool, surprisingly, came sixth out of the 10 options although it was seen as the most effective application, equal with new recruits. The least targeted group for mentoring was employees from black and minority ethnic (BME) groups. Given that case study evidence suggests that mentoring has its greatest impact in retaining and growing talent and in BME employees, it seems that many organisations lack awareness of the benefits coaching and mentoring can bring beyond short-term performance management and knowledge transfer. This conclusion is supported by responses to our question about the benefits observed from coaching and mentoring, with improved performance and employee motivation being faraway the highest responses. It is probable that the low scores for impact on retention reflect inadequacies in how companies measure the impact of coaching and mentoring. A relatively low score for impact of mentoring on diversity management (only 40% of respondents recorded this) correlates with the relatively low usage of mentoring and coaching to support diversity policies. Reverse mentoring (where the mentor is more junior than the mentee) is closely associated with diversity management, so it is not surprising that very few organisations had this kind of programme. The organisations in our survey used a variety of methods to measure the impact of coaching – from feedback from the coachee’s manager to satisfaction surveys - and none were dissatisfied with their measurement processes. (My own observation is that most current measurement processes are actually rather naïve and prone to giving false positive results.) However, very few organisations measure the impact of mentoring and those that do primarily use informal methods. The international standards for mentoring appear to have made very little headway. The type of coaching provided shows an unexpected emphasis on behavioural coaching (personal change beneficial both within and beyond the current job role – 83%) followed closely by performance coaching (application of skills and knowledge to achieve results in a current job role – 81%). Only 60% provide skills coaching and only 36% encourage peer coaching. Executive coaching is more frequently resourced externally than internally but by a much smaller margin than predicted (76% versus 47%). This suggests that companies are investing in
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009 The use of internal resources for coaching and mentoring
developing “home-grown” coaches to replace more expensive external providers. This shift of emphasis towards internal resources (potentially bad news for professional executive coaches) may be assisted by a higher level of confidence in the ability of line managers to coach than much of the coaching literature would suggest. It is common for coaching pundits to say that line managers, because they have other jobs to do and because of the dynamics of the boss-subordinate relationship, cannot be coaches – they can simply use some coaching behaviours. The majority of our survey respondents, by contrast, believe that line managers can be effective skills coaches and performance coaches to their direct reports (62% and 60% respectively) and 10% in each case believe they can be very effective in these roles. The majority of organisations (78%) aspire to become coaching cultures but two-thirds are still at the very early stages of doing so. Only 11% of organisations say that they have embedded coaching into their culture and that coaching is integrated into their day-to-day systems and behaviours. An indication that so many are at an early stage of the journey to a coaching culture is that less than two-fifths of organisations have an individual or dedicated team responsible for co-ordinating coaching across the business. (The actual proportion may be much smaller – only 84 responses were recorded for this question.) Another indicator is the low use of supervision for internal coaches at any level. However, a significant proportion of respondents said that they are looking at supervision for their internal coaches. When asked how they approached increasing the competency of in-company coaches, only just over half of the respondents answered. Of these, only slightly more than half trained line managers as coaches although nearly a third trained some coaches to be “coaches to the coaches”. Only 15% trained employees to be coached and only 26% had a process to accredit different levels of coaching competence and experience. Once again, a significant proportion of respondents said this was a project under development. Only a handful of companies had any kind of approach to preventing line managers who had been trained slipping back into their old behaviours. Those that did relied on supervision to manage the problem. The picture with regard to mentoring is slightly more positive with 79% of responding organisations providing mentor training. However, less than half trained mentees as well (a basic requirement for programme and relationship quality) and only a third had trained staff managing the mentoring programme. We also asked what problems respondents faced in making coaching and mentoring work in their organisations. For coaching, the primary issues were lack of organisational support, lack of understanding of coaching and poor coaching skills.
78% ...of organisations aspire to become coaching cultures but two-thirds are still at the very early stages of doing so
11% ... of organisations say that they have embedded coaching into their culture and that coaching is integrated into their day-to-day systems and behaviours.
EFMD Global Focus | Volume 03 | Issue 03 2009
The gradual maturing of organisations’ approaches to coaching and mentoring and towards a coaching and mentoring culture provides a substantial challenge
A similar picture emerged for mentoring but the most significant problems were difficulty in attracting mentors, mentor and mentee skills, and unrealistic expectations of mentors and/or mentees. It is always tempting to read more into survey results than the data justify. However, we can extrapolate a number of specific recommendations for both employer and provider organisations. For employers, there is a need to educate and train people to make more effective use of coaching and mentoring and to support them in these behaviours. That suggests a requirement for a coherent coaching and mentoring strategy – one that links the two activities both with each other and with the strategic priorities of the business. That in turn indicates a need for professional co-ordination of coaching and mentoring at a corporate level and for the provision of supervision for coaches and mentors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Clutterbuck is visiting professor in the coaching and mentoring faculties of both Oxford Brookes and Sheffield Hallam Universities and practice leader at Clutterbuck Associates, a division of GP (UK). His 14 books on coaching and mentoring include Coaching the Team at Work, Nicholas Brealey, London (2007)
For providers, the gradual maturing of organisations’ approaches to coaching and mentoring and towards a coaching and mentoring culture provides a substantial challenge. The other side of the coin is that there are also likely to be substantial opportunities, particularly in supporting managers in becoming internal coaches and helping organisations integrate internal and external coaching provision.
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009
Executive coaching strategies for leading in turbulent times
Coaching is in heavy demand but organisations are constrained by the current financial crisis. Erik de Haan examines the market and how the situation can be resolved
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xecutive coaching is establishing itself as an organisational and management development intervention of choice. What was once very personal has now become what is most relevant for performance in leadership roles – witness the growing interest in transformational and relationship theories of leadership and the importance attached to emotional and spiritual intelligence. Nowadays, leaders are required to be in touch with and able to express their deepest personal wishes, feelings and doubts. Executive coaching is the strategy par excellence for enabling and deepening this understanding. Furthermore, one-to-one conversations are the only organisational or management development (OD/MD) interventions that have demonstrated substantive effectiveness beyond doubt. However, while executive coaching gains ever more credibility and popularity, no-one can escape the fact that our society is embroiled in the deepest recession of our lifetimes and that the coaching profession is one of the sectors worst affected. After all, executive coaching is the most expensive of all OD/MD interventions, since the time of the coach will be exclusively devoted to a single leader or, in rare cases, to a small leadership team. There is increasing tension between the rising status of executive coaching and an economic climate where executive development budgets are being slashed. More and more leaders seek the experience of working with a coach, particularly in these anxious and turbulent times, while their organisation cannot afford them that support. In response to this dilemma a variety of creative solutions is being found. More people than ever are preparing for the eventual “upturn” by applying themselves to serious coaching development programmes such as our own Ashridge MSc in Executive Coaching. Pricing pressure is also leading to the flourishing of internal coaching programmes with external coaches being less frequently hired in their capacity as coach and more often in a capacity of a “consultant” to develop a “coaching culture” that promotes coaching styles internally or as a “supervisor” for a whole community of internal coaches. Our own Ashridge Centre for Coaching has recently been asked by organisations as diverse as consultancies, global professional services firms and government bodies to help them supervise their internal coaches and we have noticed that a growing number of internal coaches are becoming formally accredited and so are developing themselves to the highest standards of professionalism. What in my view has been less noticed but is highly pertinent here is the kind of help that the coaching profession can offer in times of turbulence, conflict and uncertainty.
EFMD Global Focus | Volume 03 | Issue 03 2009
More people than ever are preparing for the eventual “upturn” by applying themselves to serious coaching development programmes
This help is essentially threefold in my view:
· First, coaches will be well trained to listen, summarise, support, offer hypotheses and build confidence – all the usual things that coaches are reputed to do so well. They really help to prepare for, anticipate, understand and change the increasingly challenging and confusing dilemmas of business leaders.
· Second, one would hope that coaches, through their training and experience in conversation, have acquired a sophisticated expertise in working through critical moments and conflict as these happen.
We can be opinionated, partisan, even dogmatic as long as we are willing and able to consider our convictions and beliefs from entirely opposing perspectives
· Third, the counselling and coaching professions have overcome decades of divisions and rivalries between competing schools of thought and they have now entered into an era of rapprochement among themselves. Rivalries between schools are being transformed into curiosity about how others conceptualise and work with those challenges that everyone recognises. In particular, some 21st century approaches to coaching and counselling can be credited with focusing on the commonalities between the schools and on the “common factors” that underpin them all. This is what I would call the “relational turn” exemplified by a range of integrative models of executive coaching and also by the emergence of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council as a platform for bringing together a very diverse group of coaching practitioners. The essence of this relational turn is that, just as in psychotherapy, there is a good chance that any professional approach to executive coaching works and that all work equally well although it matters to what extent you yourself believe in your approach. In other words, “allegiance” is much more important than “adherence”.Again, just as demonstrations in psychotherapy have shown, various approaches and theories share all the factors that really matter, such as time for conversation, interest and warmth, rapport, a positive expectation and so on. A hugely important factor is the quality of the relationship between client and coach. In fact, it is the relationship while engaging in a coaching session that is the only one of all these “common factors” that coaches can enhance and improve from moment to moment and from session to session. Most coaches recognise and agree upon the importance of the relationship in coaching. This broad container called “relational coaching” is now energising, inspiring and uniting a new generation of coaches who are finding a common point of focus and a common route into their coaching conversations and into the wonders that take place in them. In my view the progress that has been made in reconciling professionals from the counselling and coaching professions is hugely relevant for
leaders and HR professionals. The large organisations of today that find themselves in a siloed and competitive marketplace could do well to learn not only from the direct experience of working with executive coaches but from the mediating developments of the last decade that have brought together so many executive coaching professionals. In summary, I believe that the recent history of executive coaching teaches business leaders a positive way to transform conflicts:
· I nviting them to reflect on the anxiety and turbulence they experience from a range of perspectives
· R ecognising that every viewpoint is of equal “value” and that no view or position is intrinsically “better” than any other
· Valuing the common factors, such as allegiance, the conviction one often experiences regarding one’s approach or point of view
· T eaching that common factors such as commitment and allegiance can be explored and exploited further to make them stronger leaders Essentially, this form of conflict resolution is a bit like realising that an annoying or obstructive colleague is actually also a loving member of his own family in his personal life, where he looks rather similar to ourselves. What this means for our own attitude is that we are willing and able to consider other ways of looking at the world. We can be opinionated, partisan, even dogmatic – as I believe I have been with regard to relational coaching – as long as we are willing and able to consider our convictions and beliefs from entirely opposing perspectives. This can always be possible as long as we can take a stance towards our own convictions which smiles at them, mocks them... and transforms them into sources of compassion. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Erik de Haan is Director of Ashridge Centre for Coaching, UK.
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009
Coaching teams in the workplace
Though still a relatively expensive option team coaching has significant advantages over one-to-one interventions says David Clutterbuck
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he research literature on coaching is still relatively sparse compared with other areas of people development. It is even sparser on the subject of team coaching.
What research on team coaching there is concentrates on coaching in sports. Yet the analogy with the playing field is potentially misleading, for teams at work and in sport have very different dynamics. Work teams are less about win-lose than win-win. Moreover, with a few exceptions such as emergency services, they are paced around consistent, long-term good performance rather than a lot of practice leading to bursts of superlative performance. It is not surprising, then, that when people and organisations talk about team coaching, they may mean very different things. In particular, when I was researching the topic for a book, I found consultants using the term team coaching to describe team facilitation, team building and one-to-one coaching for people who worked in the same team. All these are very different from applying the principles of coaching to the collective development of a team and its competencies. Our definition of team coaching, which has been derived from research and from workshops with hundreds of practitioners, is: “a learning intervention designed to increase collective capability and performance of a group or team through application of the coaching principles of assisted reflection, analysis and motivation for change�. This is less hands-on (less directive) than some other definitions. Facilitation differs from team coaching in a number of ways but most importantly in the stance of the facilitator, who leads the team through a conversation, in which he or she has a more or less clear perception of where it is going. By contrast, the conversation in team coaching is much more emergent, with the coach helping the team with the quality of their thinking rather than trying to lead them to a specific realisation. Facilitation, too, tends to be composed of a few short interventions designed to solve current problems of direction or behaviour. Coaching aims to help the team build its longer-term skills and its capacity to manage new challenges from its own resources. Team building differs from coaching in that its primary goal is to help people get along with each other and strengthen collaboration. Team coaching places greater emphasis on improving the underlying skills and processes, such as how the team communicates both internally and externally.
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The arguments for coaching teams rather than (or as well as) individuals include:
Conversation in team coaching is much more emergent, with the coach helping the team with the quality of their thinking rather than trying to lead them to a specific realisation
· Coaching an individual without attempting to influence the immediate human systems in which they operate reduces the impact of the coaching intervention. Over the past three years, I have been collecting anecdotal data about the effectiveness of “sheep-dip” training for line managers as coaches. It seems that when these managers return from the training course to the real world of their team, it takes very little time for habituated behaviours to reassert themselves. Everyone within the team system feels more comfortable with the behaviours and practices they know rather than new ones that may be more challenging. Teams develop habitual behaviours and norms, which exert considerable entropic energy to undermine individual and collective change. Their mental model becomes rigid and less likely to be challenged as circumstances change.
· Like individuals, teams’ effectiveness can be undermined by their quality of thinking. Addressing and improving the quality of thinking – for both individual issues and more broadly – is the core of team coaching. Teams tend to develop collective norms about a wide range of issues. For example, the amount of their thinking time that is oriented towards the past, the present, the near future or the far future tends to form a consistent pattern. One of the key roles of a coach is to help the team recognise these unconscious norms and question whether they enhance or undermine the collective performance. Team coaches help a team identify the potential for higher performance and develop the skills and processes that will help them achieve more. Among the critical elements here are having a team development plan and having the ultimate outcome of enabling the team to develop the self-sufficiency to coach itself. The team development plan is the bridge between individual developmental aspirations and the business plan for the wider unit to which the team belongs. It relates defined levels of higher collective performance to improvements in collective behaviours and the systems the team applies to its key tasks.
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009 Coaching teams in the workplace
Aiming for self-coaching reinforces the expectation that team coaches will aim to make themselves obsolete as rapidly as possible by transferring to the team co-coaching skills and the ability to engage in both focused reflection and constructively challenging dialogue. This means that team coaches themselves need to bring a substantially higher level of competence to the role than would normally be the case in one-to-one coaching. Executive coaches typically view their assignment as helping a client tackle one or more specific issues. Their role does not normally involve transferring coaching capability to the client. The team coach also has to manage complex issues of group dynamics, such as:
· Confidentiality: even with a high degree of psychological safety, team members may be reluctant to disclose to a group of colleagues or to admit weaknesses to their boss
· Pace of thinking and deciding: some members of the team may reach a conclusion faster than others. Where the coach in a one-to-one relationship can adjust the pace to the speed of a coachee’s mental processing, the team coach needs to be able to hold the attention and interest of the vanguard while ensuring the rearguard are able to catch up at their own pace
· Scope of topic: team coaching can only deal effectively with issues in which all the team members have a stake. Sometimes this involves helping team members recognise the mutual benefits and value of supporting a colleague
· Building trust within the coaching relationship: while team members will vary in the level of trust they place in the coach, progress can normally only be made when the team as a whole is ready to trust both the coach and the process
· Nature of the team: There are several ways in which to classify team dynamics. One is by the degree of interdependence between members – a field sales force, where performance is dependent on the individual efforts of each member, is not the same as a theatre team in a hospital, where everyone relies upon everyone else throughout the operation Another way is by the stability of task versus stability of membership. In a European Community funded study of how teams managed their learning, I identified on this basis six different types of team, each of which had different advantages and disadvantages in terms of offering a positive climate for learning. Understanding the type of team the coach is dealing with is essential in helping the team understand itself.
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Understanding the type of team the coach is dealing with is essential in helping the team understand itself
Figure 1: A comparison of the four levels of coaching maturity in coaching conversation Coaching approach
Style
Models-based
Control How do I take them where I think they need to go?
Process-based
How do I adapt my technique or model to this circumstance?
Contain How do I give enough control to the client and still retain a purposeful conversation?
Philosophy-based
Critical questions
What is the best way to apply my process in this instance?
Facilitate What can I do to help the client do this for themselves?
How do I contextualise the client’s issue within the perspective of my philosophy or discipline? Managed eclectic
Enable Are we both relaxed enough to allow the issue and the solution to emerge in whatever way they will?
Do I need to apply any techniques or processes at all? If I do, what does the client context tell me about how to select from the wide choice available to me? Reproduced with permission from Megginson, D and Clutterbuck, D (2009) Techniques in Coaching and Mentoring, Volume 2, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford
Team members will vary in the level of trust they place in the coach, progress can normally only be made when the team as a whole is ready to trust both the coach and the process
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009 Coaching teams in the workplace
What team coaches do The range of issues team coaches assist with is enormous. I have found it helpful to categorise them into:
· interpersonal dynamics – issues such as recognising and managing conflict, increasing collective emotional intelligence, and building and sustaining an appropriate coaching climate
· temporal issues – for example, how the team balances its emphasis on past, present and future; and time management
· managing key processes – goal setting and management, functional analysis, innovation, decision-making and communication Even so, it means that the team coach requires a breadth of experience and approach that combines a deep knowledge of team processes with strategic thinking and process knownhow. In some of the recent ruminations for a new volume on the use of techniques and tools in coaching, my co-author David Megginson and I define four levels of coaching maturity, shown in Figure 1 (on previous page). The effective team coach, I suspect, needs to have evolved his or her practice to the level of managed eclectic in order to have the flexibility, resilience and degree of relaxed insight necessary to work with the complexity of the team conversation rather than to try to control or direct it.
The effective team coach needs to have evolved their practice to the level of managed eclectic in order to have the flexibility, resilience and degree of relaxed insight necessary to work with the complexity of the team conversation
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The biggest barrier to widespread use of team coaching is that it relies for the most part on relatively expensive externally resourced expertise
Making best use of team coaching The actual use of team coaching in the workplace appears to be quite narrow. The vast majority of examples we have been able to gather relate to:
路 Helping senior executive groups become teams rather than groups of people who share responsibilities. Case study examples include heads of function or heads of country who are used to running their own fiefdoms but need to work together to achieve the next level of collective performance; and teams where performance was undermined by ongoing conflict, either relational conflict or conflict of objectives.
路 Helping newly formed teams (project teams in particular) hit the ground running. Well-timed team coaching interventions can speed up the process of forming, storming and norming. They can also ensure that learning acquired by the project team is captured and absorbed by the wider organisation. The potential to make wider use of team coaching is high, however. Given how much importance companies attach to team effectiveness, there is a case for coaching interventions whenever a team at any level goes through a major transition in role or membership, whenever it encounters significant problems, where an external perspective might lead to better quality reflection and decision-making, and whenever a major shift in behaviour is required. The biggest barrier to such widespread use of team coaching is that it relies for the most part on relatively expensive externally resourced expertise. That situation will change as organisations equip some of the most competent coaches from their internal coaching pools with the additional skills of team coaching. Credible sources of such training are only now emerging, as we develop a clearer understanding of what team coaching is and the complexity of the required competencies. The result should be a major boost to the creation of sustainable coaching cultures, as teams across organisations become accustomed to thinking together in a coaching manner.
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009
Developing an effective coaching strategy
Peter Hawkins sets out how a coaching strategy should be designed to develop both the individual manager and the organisation as a whole
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any chief executives and HR Directors are tremendously proud at the growth of coaching in their organisations. They are, however, concerned about the organisational benefit, sustaining the offering and evaluating the return on investment.
To address these concerns I first ask them: “How many coaching conversations do you think happen every month in your organisation?” Very few have a clear idea but most will estimate that it is in the thousands, particularly if you include coaching conversations by line managers and not just external and internal coaching. Then follows a simple but challenging question: “How does your organisation learn from these thousands of coaching conversations?” They are usually puzzled but curious about how coaching can lead to organisational learning and demonstrable organisational benefits. Having been involved in both coaching and organisational change for over 30 years as a practitioner, writer and teacher, I have witnessed enormous growth in the field of individual coaching. There has, though, been an over-focus on the needs of the individual client that has under-served the organisational client. This is supported by coaching conferences, which themselves focus on coaching process skills with little attention given to the organisational benefit. In my teaching at Bath Consultancy Group and Oxford Brookes University, I stress that one of the key distinguishers of coaching that separates it from counselling or psychotherapy at work is that coaching always has three clients: the individual; the organisation; and the relationship between the two. Coaches, coach trainers and supervisors, the coaching professional bodies and the employing organisations are responsible for addressing this balance. In this article I demonstrate what organisations are doing and can do to develop a more effective coaching strategy that delivers usable and measurable organisational benefit. There are four main pillars to helping organisations create an effective coaching strategy:
· S tart with the end in mind. Identify the organisational outcomes that the business is trying to achieve to which coaching can contribute
· Design the right mix of internal and external resources to deliver the desired outcomes · C reate a coaching culture where coaching is part of how things are done internally and with stakeholders
4 ... there are four main pillars to helping organisations create an effective coaching strategy
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There has been an over-focus on the needs of the individual client that has under-served the organisational client
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009 Developing an effective coaching strategy
·H ave a process to harvest the organisational learning from the thousands of coaching conversations Start with the end in mind When helping organisations develop their coaching strategy, before even discussing what coaching they might develop, I explore the organisation’s strategic ambitions and what it wants to achieve over the next three to five years. This leads naturally to the challenges in realising these ambitions, both externally and internally, and how the organisation’s culture needs to change. To paraphrase the great Mahatma Ghandi, leaders need to be the change they want to see or “leaders get the culture they behave”. Careful exploration of this provides a foundational line of sight that links the individual and team development required to lead and manage the organisation with the necessary changes in the culture to meet the organisation’s agreed outcomes. Design the coaching provision After establishing the goals that coaching is there to serve, we work with key internal executives, HR, and learning and development specialists to design the right mix of coaching provision. This normally takes place in a coaching strategy workshop where we work through a number of key questions:
· What coaching can be done as part of line performance management and what is the level of coaching skill among the managers and leaders of the organisation? How might the coaching capacity of the managers and leaders be developed?
· What coaching can be done by trained internal coaches? Do they have an internal coaching community? If so, how might the capacity and impact of this resource be developed and better targeted? What supervision and on-going development help is provided to internal coaches?
· Where can external coaches add most value? How are they selected and assessed? How does the organisation work with its external coaches to ensure they are updated on the organisational strategy and challenges to continuously serve organisational development?
· How is coaching integrated with other leadership and management development processes? How is it linked to the performance and development objectives of individuals?
· How is coaching linked to organisational development activities? Is coaching used to support leadership teams in transforming the business? How are key change leaders supported to effectively lead strategic change project teams?
· What is the right mix of individual coaching and team coaching to support leadership development? How is team coaching contracted to grow the collective capacity of the team to more effectively engage with all their stakeholders?
· How will the totality and the various elements of the coaching provision be evaluated? This is not just in terms of the quality of the inputs but also the quality of the outputs
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To paraphrase the great Mahatma Ghandi, leaders need to be the change they want to see
Figure 1: Developing a coaching culture – Outcomes
1. External coaching provision
Increase in individual leadership capacity
2. Developing internal coaching capacity
3. Actively supporting coaching endeavours
Increase in distributed leadership
4. Coaching becomes the norm for individuals and teams
5. Embedded in HR and performance management processes
Develops an increase in organisational learning
Higher performing organisation
Our experience suggests that to realise the full return on their investment the coaching provision needs to be built into a sustained programme of developing a coaching culture
6. Coaching becomes the dominant style of managemnet and leading
7. Coaching becomes how we do business with all our stakeholders
Higher engagement with all stakeholders
Higher value creation for all stakeholders
(individual and team performance change) and the outcomes (contribution to the change in the organisational performance and achievement of strategic objectives). How can we design an evaluation process, with both lead and lag indicators, that traces the influence along the strategic line of sight mapped out in stage one? Develop a coaching culture There is a danger for many organisations that once they have designed and established their coaching provision they believe the job is done and move on to other initiatives. Our experience suggests that to realise the full return on their investment the coaching provision needs to be built into a sustained programme of developing a coaching culture. At Bath Consultancy Group we have developed, in partnership with our broad mix of client organisations, a model of the stages to developing a coaching culture. This model (see Figure 1, above) first charts the most common developmental stages of coaching provision and approach and then links the outputs and the outcomes that each stage creates. This demonstrates how organisations that only focus on the supply side of their coaching endeavours, such as having a panel of external coaches or creating a cadre of trained internal coaches, are unlikely to realise the real potential outcomes that coaching can produce for their organisation.
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Special supplement | Global Focus Vol 03 | Issue 03 2009 Developing an effective coaching strategy
At the same time we assist the harvesting of collective organisational learning by:
· Bringing together, at regular intervals, the community of internal and external coaches to hear the challenges the organisation is experiencing, providing a forum for questions about the organisation’s people/culture and development
· Facilitating supervision trios on key coaching relationships with managed confidentiality ·W orking with coaches on structured systemic pattern identification to identify the key patterns that will enable or block the organisation in meeting its objectives.
· F acilitating dialogue with senior executives and coaches on emerging key themes and how coaching can contribute more to the next stages of the organisation’s development This process requires facilitation from a consultant who is not only an experienced coach and skilled coaching supervisor but also one who understands organisational strategy, culture change, systemic dynamics and organisational development. Most importantly, this facilitator needs to translate between the language of senior leadership and the language of the coaching conversations. Currently, there is still a shortage of people who can connect the strategic with the personal, commercial and value-based domains within organisations. Conclusion In this time of recession and restricted credit lines, it is inevitable that every line of cost will be regularly reviewed. There will be increasing pressure for coaching to demonstrate its return on investment and increase its capacity not only to develop leaders in a costeffective manner but to be part of effectively developing the organisation to better succeed in a volatile and fast-changing world. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Hawkins is joint founder (1986) and Chairman of Bath Consultancy Group, is a leading consultant, writer and researcher in organisational strategy, culture, leadership and executive coaching. Specialising in managing complex change and development he has worked with many leading companies throughout the world, codesigning and facilitating major change and organisational transformation projects and developing senior executives and board members. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Bath and Oxford Brookes University, both in the UK. Professor Hawkins is co-author of Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision and Development, Maidenhead, Open University Press (2006), “Transformational Coaching” in The Handbook of Coaching, London, Sage (2009 forthcoming) and is currently writing Creating an Effective Coaching Strategy, McGraw-Hill, 2010 and Team Coaching at its Edge Kogan Page 2010.
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First, we ensure that coaching relationships start with three-way contracting: the coach, the coachee, and someone more senior to the coachee who represents the organisational client and takes responsibility for how the organisation is going to benefit and learn through this coaching relationship. Each is responsible for insuring their part of a successful outcome. This might commonly involve a review meeting part way through the coaching process and also a final review at the end.
Currently, there is still a shortage of people who can connect the strategic with the personal, commercial and value-based domains within organisations
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Harvest the learning Once an organisation has built its community of internal and external coaches committed to organisational learning as well as individual development, we then assist in harvesting the organisational learning from the many coaching conversations that take place.