The Coaching Organization

A Strategy for Developing Leaders

James M. Hunt, Joseph R. Weintraub

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781452278841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

The Coaching Organization: A Strategy for Developing Leaders is the only book to provide practical advice on how a company can strategically manage coaching initiatives that strengthen organizations and enhance employee engagement and growth. Authors James M. Hunt and Joseph R. Weintraub offer best practices to help organizations deploy developmental coaching that drives leadership and employee effectiveness.

1

The Coaching Organization?

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One of the more obvious lessons of history is that there is no such thing as a self-made man or a self-made woman. We are, all of us, the result of many people who have influenced us through the years, those who guided and encouraged us—a parent, a teacher—those who reprimanded, or scolded, or corrected, or gave the advice that set us on a different course.

—McCullough (2004, p. 1)

Senior managers and human resource/organizational effectiveness professionals say something like the following in nearly every organization we visit:

• The career development of our people is just not being addressed by their managers or by anyone else. We have to do something.

• Our people complain that they just don’t get enough feedback, and they don’t know where they stand. We tell our managers to coach their direct reports, but it just doesn’t happen.

• We’re going to have a lot of people retiring over the next few years, and I just don’t know how we’re going to replace them. We’ve got good people in the pipeline, but they don’t have the right knowledge, and what they need to learn can’t be taught in the classroom.

• We’re a very flat organization now, and that’s not going to change. Our people are confused about advancement. They don’t know what “getting ahead” means anymore, and no one is talking about it.

• We’ve used external coaches, and some of them have been great, but we’re not sure where to go from here. The CEO is saying, “I want our managers to coach, we’re not going to keep paying for high-priced executive coaches at this level much longer.” But we don’t know how to make that happen. Do they have time? We’ve tried training them, and we really felt that the results were mixed.

• I have to sleep at night, and the only way that’s going to happen is if I know that we’ve got the right people on the night shift making sure that the work is getting done—leading, not waiting for me to tell them what to do. We don’t have enough of these people now, and we’re just going to need more.

These comments are representative of the worries of leaders who are trying to describe a problem that to them seems intangible, even mysterious. How do we pay attention to the developmental needs of a large number of employees, at all levels? Everyone knows that managers should coach, but for the most part, they don’t. Executive coaching, coaching by external experts, is now widely accepted, but for a variety of reasons, it isn’t a comprehensive solution for most organizations. Some organizations are now using internal expert coaches, with good results. People remain confused about the different kinds of coaching. They are confused about who should be coaching and to what ends. They aren’t always sure what the word coaching means. Perhaps most importantly, they aren’t always sure how all this relates to their business or organizational goals. For over a decade, we have worked with individual managers and organizations on this problem in a wide variety of contexts.

Early on in this effort, it was the more progressive or cutting-edge business firms, not-for-profits, and hospitals that raised such questions. Much has changed during the past decade, however. Despite a very soft economy, talent has become more important than ever. We are truly in a knowledge economy, which means that people, and their ability to think, spot problems and opportunities, and lead others toward change, are more important than ever. Even during the recent economic downturn, the concept of human capital, the view of people as an asset rather than a cost, has continued to take hold in the business world. In health care, for example, the situation is even more pressing. Health care has always been in the knowledge business and is facing an intensifying labor shortage in most professional disciplines.

Demographic trends exacerbate these challenges in all segments of society. In the coming years, the carriers of a great deal of the knowledge that made developed economies so powerful will retire. This knowledge has to be transferred, somehow, to the next generation. Much of this knowledge, particularly the knowledge required of leaders, innovators, and those with special expertise, is not written down.

Coaching, that is, providing relationship-based, on-the-job learning, is an effective means of developing a more capable workforce at all levels and creating a very competitive organizational culture, one that can successfully compete for human capital and achieve business results. Coaching is also a very important means by which knowledge can be transferred from one generation of employees to the next. One would imagine, then, that coaching and related forms of relationship-based learning will become a business imperative in the coming years. Experience to date, however, suggests that addressing this imperative will be more difficult than one might imagine. Fundamental assumptions about the role of coaching, feedback, and teaching in the modern organization need to be reexamined.

Should Leaders Develop an Internal Coaching Capability in Their Organizations?

Many business leaders and managers have assumed that learning takes place in the classroom. The job of “teaching” belongs to someone else. The professional comes to work to do his or her job, not to learn that job. Learning, though important to some, has a lower priority. Teaching others perhaps has a lower priority still. Understandably, many often believe that through an effective hiring process, they select and “onboard” individuals who are motivated, ready, and able to do their jobs. The reality, of course, is quite different. Given the pace of change, driven by competitive pressures, globalization, the need to improve quality, and the introduction of new technologies, all organizational actors are nearly always learning, or least they’d better be. The classroom makes it possible for a worker to compete, to get his or her foot in the door, but that’s only the beginning. The average knowledge worker and certainly the average leader at any level needs to be able to put concepts into action in their challenging and often idiosyncratic contexts. This requires on-the-job learning.

The only question for organizational leaders is this: Do you want to guide the learning process or not? Of note, there is the option of leaving it up to chance. It is a characteristic of human beings that they will seek out opportunities to learn and, when they get a chance, engage others in that process. However, unguided learning may be slow and inefficient and ultimately lead the learner to the wrong conclusions. (If you’ve ever tried to straighten out a recalcitrant golf swing on your own, you can relate to the problem.) The learning process can be enhanced through various interventions. Once that fact becomes clear, it should likewise become obvious that if learning is important in your organization, learning effectiveness can become a source of competitive advantage. The choice, then, of guiding learning rather than leaving it to chance seems obvious. The next question is this: How should your organization go about doing so?

When workers are asked about the experiences from which they learned the most, they usually talk about on-the-job learning experiences in which they faced a challenge and in which other individuals played a very important part. Particularly for adults, learning through facing important challenges is a most potent stimulus for personal development. Challenge by itself is insufficient, however. Research at the Center for Creative Leadership has demonstrated conclusively that for experiences to result in personal development, challenge must be accompanied by assessment and support (Van Velsor & McCauley, 2004).

Assessment here refers to, in particular, an assessment of the effectiveness of one’s efforts. The individual facing a challenge will likely need to try a variety of new actions or learn to make sense of the situation in a different way. Is the new behavior constructive in addressing the challenge? Does the new understanding of the situation help? These become critically important questions when one is in the process of learning. Unfortunately, answers to such questions in the form of feedback that helps the individual assess the effectiveness of his or her actions or understandings are often lacking just when they are needed most.

Imagine, for example, an individual engineer leading a team for the first time. She called a meeting, presented her agenda, passed around some donuts, and suggested that the group get to work. Several hours later, the first team meeting was coming to a close, and those sitting around the table seemed to the team leader to hold a variety of attitudes about what had transpired. Some were excited, but some were very skeptical. One individual seemed downright angry, or at least the team leader thought he was angry (he didn’t really say). Had she done something wrong? Was it the donuts? Had she included some people for the project who really shouldn’t have been there? Or was she sensing an inevitable reaction to change on the part of some team members? Her interpretation of what had transpired in the meeting could have a significant impact on what she and others on the team would do next.

In a recent seminar on team leadership, this particular team leader was encouraged to do a “process check” at the end of each meeting, to ask the group for feedback on how they, and she, were doing. Luckily, she remembered to ask the group for some feedback in the last few minutes of the meeting and found out that things weren’t quite as bleak as she had thought. The one individual who seemed so angry was, in reality, just demonstrating the body language he normally does when he’s confused. He was still interested in working on the project team. Relieved, the team leader said good-bye to the team members after they reviewed their assignments and planned the next session. The feedback she received for the team was invaluable, in that it gave her at least some idea of where the various team members stood. However, she still didn’t get much information about her own performance in the meeting. She needed a clearer sense of how she should manage the team in general, and she needed to figure out what to do next.

If she’s lucky, the team leader is working in an organization that has a coaching capability of some sort. If she’s fortunate enough to work for a coaching manager or if she’s lucky enough to have a mentor, she might spend a few minutes talking with that individual about the meeting that just transpired. In that conversation, she would probably review her own perception of what happened in the meeting. She would try to describe what she did and how team members reacted. Her coach or mentor might ask her some questions with the intent of clarifying what happened and at the same time encourage the new team leader to deepen her own thinking. The coach or mentor then might offer some feedback; perhaps she should have given the members of the team a bit more time to get to know one another (they actually come from different plants), and she will probably need to further refine management’s vision for the project so that the team members can get a clearer sense of the task they face. The two then might discuss next steps and agree to talk again after the next meeting. This process might be informal if the team leader is talking with a manager who has the ability to coach others or a mentor, or it might be formal if she is working with a designated coach from the firm’s organizational development department or an externally sourced executive coach.

We hope the reader can see the difference between sending the team leader ahead on her own, to sink or to swim, and helping her learn more about the challenges she is facing and develop a more informed response. Yes, she’s been to courses on team dynamics and project management, but when actually running a project and a team for the first time, translating classroom-based concepts into action is extremely difficult. Each situation is at least to a degree unique. If she sticks with roles that involve team leadership and project management, in time, she’ll become an expert. She’ll get to know her own strengths and weaknesses as a project leader. She’ll get a feel for the rhythm and life cycle of teams and projects. She will become a better communicator.

In the absence of coaching, the team leader might survive in her role as team leader, though the road might be more stressful and her performance, though adequate, might not be stellar. Alternatively, she might not survive in that role. The team might not be successful. The project might not reach its goals: another strategic initiative that failed at the execution stage. This is what leaders, not just human resource and organizational development leaders, but business, not-for-profit, government, and hospital leaders need to consider when pondering the question of whether or not they should build a coaching capacity within their organizations. Organizational capability expands when people learn from challenges they face, on the job, through the mechanisms of coaching within supportive, learning-oriented relationships.

An Organizational-Level View of Coaching

We’ll describe what we call developmental coaching in greater detail in Chapter 2. For now, though, coaching can simply be viewed as an activity taking place within a relationship that promotes learning from experience in one or both of the partners in that relationship. Despite the difficulties organizational leaders face in building a coaching capability, the situation is not entirely bleak. Over the past decade or so, the concepts of coaching and mentoring have begun to have a significant impact on the workplace. Some call coaching a fad, but we doubt that is the case. Although coaching in any of its varied forms is underresearched to date, the research that has been done clearly indicates that coaching benefits both individuals and their employing organizations. The benefits we outlined for our team leader and her organization are quite real.

Individuals who have been the recipients of effective coaching report that it is satisfying, helpful, and often leads to better performance (Buckingham & Coffman, 1999; Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee, 2002; Hall, Otazo, & Hollenbeck, 1999; Hunt, 2004). They further report that they have changed and that they are not only more skillful but also more confident, more certain of their direction, more self-aware, and more able to understand the perspectives of others (Hunt, 2004). Coaching-related activities are also clearly associated with improved business results as measured by variables such as profitability and customer satisfaction (Buckingham & Coffman, 1999). Our own work has also shown that coaches reap the benefits of learning from their time spent in coaching others.

Once he or she is solid on the value of guided on-the-job learning, the organization leader who wants to build a coaching capability has some basic issues to address. First, the leader will either have to train the existing staff in coaching or import coaching skills through the use of external consultants. The skills of coaching will then be available to a group of employees. Coaching is seen as a skill—a tool, if you will—that can be added to the toolkit and used as needed.

While this is one very valid way of looking at the building of a coaching capability, we’ve found this view of coaching to be somewhat limited. To view coaching as a skill to be deployed both underestimates its value and underestimates what it means to put that skill into action. Such a view implies that the only benefit of coaching is the building of employee skills or employee development. In our experience, a coaching capability can create value that goes well beyond the development of more skilled employees and leaders.

We initially explored the field of coaching in an effort to understand the behavior of managers who are known as being effective coaches to their direct reports. Coaching by managers is one of the leadership behaviors most desired by subordinates, but unfortunately least practiced (Lombardo & Eichinger, 2001). Through interviews with a large number of such managers, we were able to articulate the “real-world tactics” employed by such individuals. That effort resulted in the book The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business (Hunt & Weintraub, 2002a). That work, however, also accompanied an ongoing action research practice, in which we further explored the means by which that rare species of manager, the “coaching manager,” emerged from the large majority of managers who are not willing and/or able to coach people who work for them. In the process, we learned more about the value proposition of coaching.

One important benefit of the widespread deployment of coaching by managers, for instance, is a not-so-subtle shift in their leadership styles. In an early paper, we described how the act of coaching itself requires not just the learning of a skill but also considerable personal growth on the part of the manager (Hunt & Weintraub, 2004). They must learn to view their roles and relationships in a very different way. Coaching requires that managers lead rather than control. The impact of such a change in leadership style on the organization can be considerable. Coaching managers have to increase the overall level of real communication and trust in their units. Learning requires both.

We found in our earlier research that one of the most significant challenges that managers face, if they realistically hope to become coaching managers, is creating what we have called a “coaching-friendly context.” The coaching-friendly context can be viewed as a subculture within an organization that directly supports coaching-facilitated learning. In a coaching-friendly context, employees feel more able to talk frankly with others about their development, challenges, and mistakes. In such an environment, employees’ natural interest in learning and self-improvement comes to the fore, and the responsibility for driving learning is shared between the manager and his or her direct reports. Coaching is n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Coaching Organization?
• 2. An Overview of Developmental Coaching
• 3. The Coaching Organization Assessment
• 4. A Strategic Approach to Coaching
• 5. Driving Strategic Transformation Through Executive Coaching at Whirlpool
• 6. Building and Leading a Coaching Capacity
• 7. The Internal Coaching Capability
• 8. The ELP Internal Coaching Program at Wachovia Corporation
• 9. Building a Coaching Manager Capability
• 10. The Coaching Manager in Nursing
• 11. Peer Coaching at Citizen’s Financial Group (CFG)
• Concluding Remarks: The Frontiers of the Coaching Organization
• References
• Appendix A: The Competencies of the Expert Executive Coach
• Appendix B: The Coaching Manager Self-Assessment
• Index
• About the Authors
• About the Contributors