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Challenges and Solutions

Results from a recent PWC global survey of coaches show that coaching has stepped firmly into the spotlight in the world of business trends. As a profession, coaching now contributes more than .5-billion to the global economy and is gaining ground in South Africa, with a rapidly expanding community of professional coaches. This trend reflects the growing interest and appetite from organisations for coaching to support the potential and development of their people.

However, professional, outsourced coaching – generally known as ‘executive coaching’, and for good reason - is typically out of the reach of the bulk of the organisation. Costly and specialised, these interventions typically target a select group of senior leaders or high-potentials. And while these external coaching professionals offer tried-and-tested models and honed professional skills, at the beginning of the engagement, they typically have limited knowledge of the organisation, its business and challenges – knowledge that deepens over long-term engagements.

As organisations feel the increased need for leadership at all levels, the requirement to adapt to rapid and continuous change, and the desire to retain and fast-track the growth of individuals within the organisation, they often look internally for a solution. This solution frequently takes the form of calling upon leaders to take responsibility for coaching and development of others beyond the executive suites, throughout the organisation.

With demonstrated benefits including those listed below, it is little wonder that the ‘leader as coach’ is becoming a common phenomenon in our organisations.

• Cultural change, including the growth of a coaching culture
• Improved management skills and capability
• Behaviour change in the coaches
• Greater employee engagement and commitmentImprovements to business indicators or results
• Savings in HR time/costs
• Achievement of external awards and recognition
• Accelerated talent development

(From research conducted by the UK-based Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development on the benefits of coaching by managers within an organisation)

This ‘leader as coach’ approach offers coaches with the best knowledge of the organisation at no consulting cost. However, it is a mistake to believe that there is no cost at all. The cost to leaders of adding coaching responsibilities is significant, particularly if the leader coaching initiative is not effectively managed within an organisation.

The world of today’s leader
Leaders today face ever-increasing complexity. Task complexity increases, as they are asked to do more, process more, manage more… in less time with fewer resources. At the same time, role complexity is increasing, as leaders are asked to wear more hats, and play more varied roles. Added to this are the complex demands from multiple stakeholders including followers, the organisation and community, as well as the aspiration to achieve work-life balance.

In the context of all of this, how do leaders feel about the responsibility of formally coaching others? When leadership teams engage with WorldsView’s Nine Conversations in Leadership programme, they explore the requirements of coaching and seek solutions to coaching effectively. Many tell us they feel overstretched and ill-equipped… but few ever question the importance of the role of the leader as a coach.

Coaching - a new role… or a skill?
There’s an argument to be made that coaching is not as new as we like to believe. My grandfather, working as a leader in the 1950s industrial sector, talks about the importance of ‘bringing others along’ and reminisces about how he had to ‘groom the next generation’… activities that, when you get into them, have a great deal in common with coaching and mentoring. However, these relationships were typically informal and ad-hoc, and did not carry the label and expectation associated with ‘leader as coach’ philosophies as we understand them today.

There is an often vigorous debate between practitioners in the field regarding whether we should see coaching as simply another competency and skill of the leader - another style of conversation or interaction they can have with followers - or whether the coaching ‘hat’ should be seen as another role, a formalised duty or relationship.

There is no question that coaching competencies are a critical part of our view of the leader, and that developing these competencies creates significant shifts in leadership style and communication. Formalised leader as coach programs will build leaders’ coaching skills and permeate these into broader organisational and management discussions.

However, will informal coaching necessarily deliver the benefits organisations seek? This question is difficult to answer, as measuring the benefits of a coaching intervention is virtually impossible when coaching is an informal, invisible facet of a leader’s style, rather than being clearly delineated in focused, dedicated coaching sessions.

Maximising the results of coaching
Research into effective coaching practice reveals some interesting results, which might help us understand the potential benefits of a more structured organisational approach to coaching. This research indicates that effective coaches have a few clear purpose and use a model, either implicit or explicit, in their coaching interventions.

This indicates that if organisations are hoping to emulate the benefits of coaching through their leaders,’ internal coaching, there are strong arguments for more structured leader-as-coach programmes. This level of structure varies, and within an organisation each leader-coach would ideally find their own style within a robust methodology.

Training for coaches should include self-exploration and training aimed at growing the personal competencies of a leader coach, as well as a structured process that helps leader coaches engage with and personalise an organisational coaching model and process.

The challenges of the leader as coach
How then, can we best support and equip our leaders to effectively take on the role of leader as coaches within the organisation? As always, we first turn to those leaders to understand their experience and the challenges that are most critical to them.

One of the conversations in our Nine Conversations in Leadership program focuses exclusively on coaching and developing individuals, and within this space, leaders share and explore their experiences and challenges in this area.

These leaders tell us that the greatest challenges they face is stepping up to the coaching challenge are:

• the personal leadership and self-mastery required to be an effective coach
• the time management and prioritisation of coaching vs other organisational issues
• issues of confidentiality and ethics in coaching relationships
• personal risk and fear of failure
• the dynamics of power and authority that dual roles as manager and coach creates
• the emotional energy required to coach others

The same leaders reflect on great rewards flowing out of their coaching relationships, such as the consolidation of their own experience and knowledge, in imparting skills and experience to others, new skills and ways of relating as a result of their coaching training and experience, and increased bench strength in their team and followers to support them.

Equip Leaders to become effective Coaches
These concerns and challenges suggest a number of clearly-defined ways in which the organisation can effectively support a leader coach program and the leaders who power it. Here we offer some of the key support structures our leaders are asking for.

Develop personal leadership
Leaders in any organisational context benefit from a structured approach to developing their personal mastery and leadership skills – but this applies particularly to those who are called upon to coach others. Emotional intelligence, self-awareness and personal leadership are all proven characteristics of effective coaches. When we create leader as coach programmes, we should focus on the leaders’ personal growth as well as the employees’ development. Personal leadership sustains and equips the leader as coach.

Provide Tools and Skills Development
Coaching is a complex set of coaching skills and behaviours, refined over time and benefiting from peer learning and support. Training in coaching skills and behaviours is essential to support leader-coaches and to increase the success of the organisational coaching programme, and should include practise coaching conversations and peer feedback. The interactions between coaches in training offer an opportunity to build communities of coaches that can support each other on an ongoing basis. Just as coaching is fundamentally based on the belief that emerging leaders can be supported in their growth, so too can coaches be supported in their ongoing development, by sharing challenges and experiences with their peers.

Clarify Role Integration
A critical challenge raised by leaders is the difficulty of understanding when and how to use coaching and how to integrate coaching with other roles.
Organisations that address these issues – the leader-coach’s level of personal awareness, their skills and tools, and the organisational context in which they operate – provide a stable foundation for the journey to effective coaching, while reducing the risk of burning out leaders within the organisation.

Coaching training and support should address the challenges that leaders will face as coaches, including balancing their roles as manager and coach, the appropriate use of coaching as an intervention, and the ethical issues that may arise.

Donna Kipps

This article was originally published in the August 2007 issue of HR Future magazine.