Achievement through a Coaching Culture

Coaching is not a new management fad. Coaching is a long term but robust management method for releasing the potential of people throughout an organisation, for transferring skills and letting people practise new approaches within a safe environment.

If you start with the premise that it takes good people, managed well with a compelling vision to achieve anything robust, then you would appreciate that most of the management methods we currently use are not adequate.

Leaders are needed who understand and appreciate differences, trust and support their colleagues and work with commitment and energy. This requires a set of skills and attitudes which we are rarely trained for and, even less often, have a role model to emulate. If what we desire is to create a culture where staff are encouraged to:

• Use problem solving skills (all the way down the line)
• Take responsibility for creating solutions
• Be honest about what works and what might work
• Be confident that trying even when mistakes are made is right
• Be creative 

Then some new cultural norms and a whole set of new skills needs to be developed by our managers.

Executive and business coaching can playa vital part in the transformational changes required in management methods, skills and learning environments to support this new and vital approach.

What is executive and business consulting?
Executive coaching is a cooperative process between a coach and an executive and, ideally, his or her team to fulfil their potential by identifying skills weaknesses and business goals, build life balance and to gain and improve management skills by practising them in a safe and supportive environment.

Say for example you habitually miss the deadline for your monthly report. You probably find that at that time of the month your stress levels are very high and you feel exposed. To improve this, make a commitment that you will complete the report 2 days earlier than the deadline. If you discipline yourself to complete this process you will notice 2 things:

1. The first 2-3 times will be really tough. You will have to identify your blockages and in some cases actively chase information from other colleagues.
   
   
2. The more often though you complete this on time, the easier it will become. Soon it will be the way you do things -unthinkingly. It will also be the way that others treat you also unthinkingly. Quite simply you have developed a new habit and in doing that you will have influenced and changed the habits of those around you.

This of course is one of the great outcomes of all behavioural change not only the impact it has on you but on how it changes the way you interact with others and in turn how they then interact with you.

What executive coaching produces
FORTUNE magazine reports (July 23, 2001 issue) that one reader said, "I went into the coaching experience kicking and screaming, at the insistence of my then boss. And what an eye-opener it turned out to be. I won't even go into the grim details of bad management habits I had unthinkingly developed in my 14-year career up to that point - but I will say that since I was 'cured' by 12 weeks of pretty intense coaching, I've been promoted three times."

Executive Coaching enables an executive or executive team to change their behaviour in the workplace to become more effective leaders, the improvement being measured by increased productivity across the executive's field of control and impact

The coach guides, facilitates, advises and educates the executive. Executive coaching is designed to deliver quantifiable improvements in the executive's performance and can be measured by superior achievement of goals particularly through improved performance from his/her team brought on by:

• Clearer communication and agreement on goals
• Improved feedback mechanisms
• Closing of communication loops
• The delegation of responsibility for problem solving
• The ability to develop and retain key staff

as well as improvements in the executive's personal job satisfaction and life balance.

Examples of where coaching has been helpful recently are:

James was a senior executive in a major charity. He had been with the organisation for 6 years, was considered a valuable employee -yet he was thinking of leaving. He was working 14 hour days regularly, his wife had given him an ultimatum, he had started to blow up at his staff and had less and less energy to deal with any of the stress in his life.

James was not an unintelligent man but he had become constrained in developing solutions and had become more insular as his work hours increased. As he put it "I always figured that with one big push I'd get over the hump and have time to change after that". His organisation had seen this before and his CEO asked James if he would work with a coach to see if that would help. IT DID.

The coaching programme enabled James to see that he was not delegating sufficiently because he did not have a good method for communicating assessment criteria, no good feedback mechanisms and he was reticent to talk performance with his staff. The result being - he was taking on personally all the problems in his division.

It also helped him look more objectively at his total life and make some fundamental changes to his commitment to his own health and to his time with his family. Over a period of 3 months James made substantial changes to both his work and his home life. He still works hard -but now his people are involved and his commitment to his family and himself are such that his B/P is down significantly and his joy for life has returned.

Another positive result from this coaching was the realisation of the CEO that their culture was such that problems floated to the top for solving in all areas.

The Executive Team were under enormous pressure and work was not getting done. With coaching the CEO started with herself and started delegating more effectively. A coaching programme for the executive team is now in place with the stated aim of engeneering a coaching culture throughout the organisation and to put decision making back in its place i.e. with the people who can actually implement its decisions.

Once an executive team has adopted the principles of coaching in management, through role modeling, that method of people management can readily spread to becoming the dominant force in an organisation.

In not-for-profit where the retention of key staff can be a real issue and the recruitment of lesser skilled staff a reality due to cost constraints, the ability to skill transfer and to build confidence and a "can do" attitude in staff is a worthwhile investment.

Mentoring for Senior Management
As the old saying goes, 'It's lonely at the top." And even more so in our culture where "individualism" is lauded. Our culture venerates the myth that we make it on our own denigrating the support and contribution of teams, families and other networks. This in conjunction with the difficult and often stressful decisions for downsizing and job change which have to be made by CEO's results in feelings of lack of support and loneliness too often for our most senior executives.

That's why CEO coaching or mentoring is a very useful tool for the person who carries the weight of responsibility for the organisation.

The purpose of mentoring is to provide the CEO of an organisation with a sounding board to think through key issues, to practise ideas before exposing them to either a Board or employees; to have a dispassionate listener who can assist the CEO identify their unconscious weaknesses and then work out how to address them.

The relationship created with the executive coach is in addition to, and does not replace, existing relationships with the CEO's senior management, board members or other advisors.
One advantage of the executive coaching relationship is that there are no 'strings attached'
to conversations -as exist when the parties have on-going formal relationships and established roles that must be considered.

But wait. Aren't the people who have reached senior executive or CEO level already skilled at precisely all those human relationships and at understanding behaviour now considered so crucial to good leadership?

You would think so -but this is not always the case. As Gordan Cairns CEO of Lion Nathan put it "I think for people like myself, who want to improve leadership skills, it's possible to get to a certain point, and beyond that you need professional help. It's like athletes. If they want to take a quantum leap in their performance, they get a coach."

To enquire about your Newcastle Business consultant please contact Partnercorp.