"Coaching" is a popular buzzword in corporate circles - but who benefits from this practice, and are they the people who need it most? Jules Newton considers the ins and outs of coaching, and reveals what her own experiences have taught her.

Who to coach, or not to coach? That is the question!

Make no mistake – it’s got to be the coolest thing to do right now. Having your own coach is right up there with driving the latest cool car, or wearing the coolest shoes! Only a couple of years ago, most folk who engaged the services of a coach did so under the radar – the coolness factor has crept in after the first ‘early adopters’ started seeing real personal benefits when the job was done well. Now, coaching is becoming a mainstream part of personal development and effectiveness, and many corporate and smaller organizations are queuing up to engage teams of coaches to help their exec teams lift their game a bit (or a lot, depending on where you’re standing!).

As a company that has been involved in the South African Coaching industry almost since it began, we started with a real struggle: who should be our prime coaching target market? There are a lot of good coaching companies and consortiums focusing on the ‘Executive’, ‘Business’ and ‘Life coaching’ spaces, and this seemed the obvious place to work: it was a market segment already sensitized to the benefits of coaching, and with ample personal development budgets in place. But, possibly because of the types of clients we had, or maybe the relationships we had with them, we kept on being drawn into projects that required frontline staff to be coached.

Now that’s quite a tough ask: qualified coaches don’t come very cheap by the hour, and sadly, there’s not really as much money floating around to develop frontline staff as there would be for executives. So the company’s compromise was to cut down on the number of sessions with a coach each person would receive. For anyone tempted to approach frontline coaching in a similar way, don’t! This was a bad idea! The coaching sessions themselves went really well. In feedback after the sessions, ‘coachees’ raved about their insights, goals and plans they were going to execute. But a month after the coaching sessions, when further feedback was sought, hardly any people had been able to fully implement their resolutions in the workplace. Their ‘ahas’ were quickly drowned in the noise of the ‘same old’ environment they operated in, with no real support or involvement from their direct line managers.

An entirely different picture emerged, though, when those same line managers entered the realm of coaching. Here, the budgets are a bit healthier ‘per head’. And, integrated with some topical insights on managing themselves and their teams, coaching interventions had a much more sustainable impact. Here we focused on helping line managers become better managers of people, and equipped them with skills and insights in ‘mindfood’ sessions that were then picked up in their personal coaching sessions and integrated into their management approach of their teams going forward. Part of this approach was to equip managers with their own coaching skills so that they themselves would be able to deliver appropriate coaching when their direct reports most needed it. They would also be able to have a significant impact on the environment to make sure their teams were enabled, rather than disabled, through the changes they planned to implement. The results we were able to achieve through this approach were really impressive, although they would typically take some time to achieve.

A management coaching intervention is not a quick fix. The interventions we have been involved in over the years sometimes run for up to six months, and the impact on the bottom line only really seems to show itself at around month four. This must be taken into account by HR practitioners who are always under pressure to measure ROI: in many interventions with which we have been involved, executive pressure pushes practitioners to measure results too prematurely.

In our experience, the first couple of months that a manager experiences coaching, the focus is primarily on looking inward, getting better personal understanding, and working on placing their own ‘effectiveness’ feet firmly on the ground. Only then are they really ready to start looking around at the team that reports to them in order to figure out how best to enable each individual on the team. And then always follows some trial and error before they figure out the best formula and are able to see the results take shape. Coaching is about personal transformation that takes place one person at a time, and time is what it takes.

So management coaching interventions are not for sissies! Companies need to be prepared to commit considerable budget and time for execution up front, and be prepared to hold their breath for a while when nothing obvious seems to be changing with their people. The upside is that once managers begin to implement the shifts they experience in their own personal space with their teams, the results are profound, and sustainable.

So who to coach? Make no mistake: it’s important that company execs and senior managers make use of this personal transformational tool to help them reflect and self-correct, so they are able to meet the challenges business today deals them. All of us are looking for the thing that will give us the edge. And frontline staff really need coaching to help them manage themselves in the customer interface as effectively as possible – but we’re convinced their bosses can handle that, with a bit of help.

But, the band that most needs focus and coaching, in our opinion, is the team of people that manage the frontline. When the team of people almost solely responsible for the ‘tyre hits the tar’ execution of strategy in most companies have the personal capability to manage themselves and the people they are responsible for leading, then real execution happens. There is nothing more sustainable than that!

Jules Newton runs Avocado Vision, a company that specializes in helping people communicate with one another more effectively. They can be contacted at (011) 614 0206, or www.avovision.co.za

• Add New

Comments (0)

Write comment

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Title:

Message:

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.