WHY COACHING?

According to estimates by the International Coach Federation, the global coaching sector generates about US$ 2 bn a year in revenue

In their 2016 annual report on the coaching industry, Ridler & Co showed that nearly three quarters (73 per cent) of the 105 blue-chip organisations it surveyed expect to increase investment in coaching over the next two years.

With coaching so widespread, it makes sense to go back to the basics and ask, ‘Why coaching’?

Coaching is not a panacea for every executive development and performance issue. However it does overcome the key limitations of many leadership development programmes.

In their article ‘Why Do Leadership Development Programmes Fail?’, McKinsey & Co offer four reasons why many leadership development programmes fail to live up to expectations: overlooking context, decoupling reflection from real work, underestimating mindsets and failing to measure results.

Overlooking context vs context specific

Context is a critical component of successful leadership, argue the authors. A brilliant leader in one situation does not necessarily perform well in another. Yet many leadership development programmes take a one-size-fits-all approach in their design.

By contrast an executive coaching engagement can be highly tailored to the individual’s context and to the outcomes that are needed. A key element in the skill of a coach is to spend time understanding the very particular set of circumstances faced by the individual, and shaping the coaching conversation and objectives accordingly.

 

Decoupling reflection from real work vs reflecting whilst on the job

Most leadership programmes take place off site, often in a campus-style environment. Executives are given the opportunity to step back from the data to day and reflect on their development. However adults typically retain just 10 per cent of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing. Furthermore, burgeoning leaders, no matter how talented, often struggle to transfer even their most powerful off-site experiences into changed behaviour on the front line.

Some programmes try to remedy this by having participants write application essays or work on projects put forward by client organisations.

Neither approach, however, can provide the immediacy of coaching which is interwoven with the executive’s day job. It thereby makes it much more likely that the conversations have an immediate and lasting impact since the insights and learning from them can be applied straightaway, and those outcomes further reviewed and refined at the next coaching session.

  

Underestimating mindsets vs getting below the surface

Both leadership development programmes and coaching are about behavioural change s well as education. To be effective this requires going below the surface and understanding the underlying beliefs and assumptions that make leaders behave the way they do.

Identifying some of the deepest, “below the surface” thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and beliefs is usually a precondition of behavioural change—one too often shirked in development programs, according to the authors.

The confidential, one-on-one nature of coaching conversations, however, creates a dynamic that is much more supportive, enabling executive to re-examine their assumptions and beliefs in a safe environment. Because the coaching process is much more of a dialectic, rather than a lecture, they is more scope for the executive to voice opinions that might otherwise go unexamined.

 

Failure to measure results vs return on expectations

While many companies pay lip service to the importance of developing leadership skills, they very often have no evidence to quantify the value of their investment. Too often, any evaluation of leadership development begins and ends with participant feedback, nick-named ‘happy sheets’ by business school professors.

So perhaps it is not surprising that many leadership programmes are failing to get results. Only seven per cent of senior managers polled by a UK business school think that their companies develop global leaders effectively, and around 30 per cent of US companies admit that they have failed to exploit their international business opportunities fully because they lack enough leaders with the right capabilities.

Coaching also faces the same challenge of measuring return on investment. How do you quantify complex activities that usually involve soft skills and can be seen as highly subjective? Yet coaching does have the advantage that engagements, if set up well, have focused objectives with clear success measures. So, whilst you may not be able to put a dollar value on an improvement – such as confidence in decision-making - you know what results you are expecting and can certainly confirm whether the improvement has been observed or not.

These four factors contribute to the success of coaching engagements and go a long way to explain why coaching is now so widely used to develop corporate leaders.

 

‘Why leadership development programmes fail’ was written by Pierre Gurdjian, Thomas Halbeisen, and Kevin Lane and published in McKinsey Quarterly in January 2014.

The 2016 Ridler Report can be found here: http://www.ridlerandco.com/ridler-report/