How coaching can be used to add value to organisations and improve personal performance.
Peter Goodge
Whether they are HR professionals, consultants or line managers, many coaches do a great job. But they could do so much more. The skills of many coaches are underused they could be adding immense value to organisations and achieving big personal successes. Yet very few coaches appreciate that.
The Problem Is that even exceptional coaches have limited views about what coaching is and how it works. If you think it’s primarily about improving job performance, you are blinkered. As a coach there is a bigger role waiting for you. If you think about coaching’s tools in terms of Kolb’s learning cycle, the Grow model, psychometric questionnaires and so on, you are inflexible. There are so many other valuable tools.
Most coaching relates to areas such as personal performance, relationships, careers, appraisals, leadership and development planning. We don’t think of coaching in the context of setting strategic goals, identifying an organisation’s unique differentiators, devising business plans, or building corporate values. But we should do, because there is an enormous need.
The big, intractable problems that executive teams struggle with are not personal, but strategic. They are problems not of leadership style or personal development, but of how to succeed in complex, changing and highly competitive contexts.
If you need convincing, study the organisation’s strategy document. It’s likely to be vague and inconsistent (except for the inexplicable targets). Listen to what executives worry about and take note of what they try to give time to. It’s likely to be the big business issues of the day.
Step 1: dare to coach strategy
Most coaches know little about business strategy, but they have fantastic skills with people and decision-making. Many of the skills needed to help an individual rethink his or her style are exactly the skills needed to help an executive team to work through a major business issue. They include listening, reflecting, summarising, challenging and mediating. Those skills are of equal importance, and they work just as well with business issues and executive teams as they do with personal questions and individuals.
Some HR professionals have used coaching to make huge contributions to the development of business strategy, even though they have only a limited knowledge of business. (although a good commercial understanding really helps).
To contribute to business strategy, use the same routes into executive discussions, meetings and workshops that HR business partners do. This means asking about business plans; studying the performance figures; and enquiring about, and even looking for, problems.
Step 2: change yourself and people
Coaching methods have changed little in 10 years, perhaps even 20 years. The formula for coaching has traditionally been a process, such as the Grow model, plus individual assessment instruments such as 360 degree feedback or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It’s a good formula, but it has its limits.
This traditional approach struggles with complex, intellectually challenging questions because most coaching assumes single-issue problems that individuals can work through for themselves in a short time, if helped. For example, the first step of Grow asks for a single goal. What if there is a range of sometimes conflicting, sometimes vague goals and sub-goals? This is often the case when coaching on strategy.
The traditional approach also struggles with challenging and changing fundamentally how people think. Most coaching approaches are passive. They listen to, and work with, people’s current perceptions. That’s not so helpful when people are psychologically stuck within a framework of unproductive, but self supporting, beliefs. Many poor performing organisations seem stuck – they never really change until people think differently.
We need to add new techniques to our coaching toolkit so that we redefine not only what coaching is, but also how it works. These new tools need to work with complexity and create challenge. An example is paired comparisons: ask an executive to list their business goals, then consider the goals in pairs and choose which one they would prefer to achieve and why. How many times each goal is chosen is interesting – it is a measure of its relative importance. The recurring reasons why goals are chosen will provide valuable insights into how the executive perceives things.
For great sources of new tools, try strategic mapping and personal construct psychology (PCP). Mapping is highly visual. It uses yellow sticky notes and flipcharts to create, question and elaborate on business plans. PCP teases out, explores and transforms thinking it is the psychology of perceptions of options and outcomes.
Coaching has a huge strategic opportunity. Coaches can engage with the business as well as help with style and relationships. Armed with additional tools, they can help to develop and deliver strategy. Coaching can and should be much, much more than it is.
About the author
Peter Goodge is an expert in HR business partnering and service delivery. He works with HR functions. developing new added-value strategies and structures.
He also works with individuals, providing assessment, training and coaching for HR professionals.
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Published:
3 October 2005
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