Perspectives on coaching
"Inside every business person, executive and professional, is a human being that benefits from support."
-Kathleen Spike, Master Certified Coach

Ask Jeff Immelt (the new CEO of General Electric) about coaching and you will probably get a resounding thumbs up for the concept. After all, in Jack Welch, it's not every day you are given the opportunity to be coached by one the most famous and successful business figures of your generation! Read perspectives on coaching to discover the benefits coaching could offer your business.

Ever had the feeling that you were stuck in your professional life? Do you often think that your problems are too large to overcome? Are you struggling to assert yourself or plan for the future?

All of the issues described above can be addressed through coaching. Coaching usually refers to a relationship between an individual and a trained professional who work on a set of pre-defined objectives with the aim of achieving particular goals or targets. Coaching protagonists believe that as a result of this relationship, greater results can be achieved and an individual can go on to do things that would otherwise have been impossible.

Of course, coaching cannot be summarized as easily as that! It is recognized as having many guises and is applicable to many situations. Because it can take on many forms, most authors are reluctant to offer a single definition of the concept, as can be explored in The coaching network: a program for individual and organizational development.

It is important to remember that coaching can be used at all levels of an organization and is not necessarily confined to middle or lower levels. Many high level executives have benefited from it in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

"I see coaching as a gift and a positive and energizing experience which above all enables an executive to shake off what may in fact be deeply held automatic beliefs and behaviors that are inhibiting performance and career development. I spent twenty-six years at my previous employer and my confidence increased so substantially as a result of coaching that I declared an ambitious commitment to the directors to win additional business. I estimate that I was able to add more than £15 million of extra value through interventions I initiated directly linked to what I had learned in coaching."
-Head of Organizational Development at a large bank

One of the fundamental principles on which coaching is based is that nothing is ever so good that it can't be improved. In Executive coaching: the route to business stardom Steve O'Shaughnessy believes that the same applies to people. In fact, it applies to people with all the more force the better people get at a particular activity. The reason for this is that the higher up the skill hierarchy one goes, the more important marginal improvements in performance become.

O'Shaughnessy argues that improvements in individual and organizational performance usually come incrementally. It is inspired leadership that helps to improve the performance of an organization, and so incremental improvements in executive performance, through coaching for example, are crucial for business success.

"Personal growth, unaided, can be slow and discouraging. With the assistance of a personal coach, people can tap into broader resources, faster, plus they have the help of someone who brings experiences and perspectives that they might not access on their own."

-Richard Haasnoot

However, O'Shaughnessy is quick to highlight the "stigma" which is attached to coaching in the UK in particular, and the negative, almost school-like connotations that are attached to the term. He believes that Europe has much to learn from the United States on this matter - people are actually often proud to admit that they are being coached in the US because they see it as indicating the importance their employer attaches to them.
Despite the negative connotations, it is widely believed that most of us do actually recognize the need for outside help with many issues as there is a limit to everyone's understanding of themselves. O'Shaughnessy explains how in essence we are all prisoners of our own abilities and we have trouble finding the many keys that can release us from the limited perceptions we have of ourselves. Frequently we cannot recognize our own potential and we are the first to put ourselves down. The argument is that coaching can be likened to one of these missing keys and when used in the right circumstances can provide useful benefits.

Taking the coaching concept one step further, The coaching network: a program for individual and organizational development introduces the relatively new concept of a coaching network. The article describes how an organization-wide community of thinkers and learners can be fostered in order to benefit organizational innovation and creativity as a whole, thus leading to competitive advantage.

Coaching networks tackle the issue of incremental growth in a broader sense, and aim to build individual and organizational development in an ongoing way through a particular form of dialogue. They allow employees from across an organization to come together in pairs as performers and coaches who can help create a community of practice and knowledge creation. An example from Canada reports how participants in a coaching network felt that they achieved a great deal, principally because of the fact that everyone can be better than they are. After all, we are only human and we should take the opportunity to learn from each other both for our own benefit and that of the organization.

The value of coaching is often all too visible in the form of big achievers and successful people in many walks of life. In Forty things every manager should know about coaching the author uses the examples of famous sports figures. Apart from sheer talent, these individuals share common elements of success: a desire to be the best, a belief in their own ability and, of course, hard work. They also share one more characteristic regardless of their sport: none of them have done it on their own.

The author argues convincingly that sports at the highest level offer a comparison from which those in business have been slow to learn. He states that by looking behind any successful athlete you will find the quality of performance is matched by excellence of the system that produced the results. For this reason he states that coaching remains the secret weapon of many outstanding organizations. There is only so much that a business can productively do by way of downsizing, restructuring, focusing on the core business and the like. Ultimately, it comes down to personal drive and building winning teams.

Whatever your own opinion may be, the general consensus is that coaching is here to stay. In its many guises and styles, coaching will continue to contribute greatly to personal and organizational development in the future.

Reproduced with permission from ManagementFirst 2002