Managing Coaching at Work

Developing, Evaluating and Sustaining Coaching in Organizations

Jackie Keddy, Clive Johnson

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780749461362
• eBook ISBN: 9780749461379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Based on direct experience and a realistic understanding of the scope of influence that many coaching champions have within their organizations, Managing Coaching at Work provides practical guidance on all aspects of making workplace coaching work. It serves as an essential reference for any manager or HR professional looking to bring coaching into their organization and for those seeking to move forward, re-energize or maximize the true potential of their true coaching investment.

This comprehensive guide covers all of the key issues many organizations face, including:

·Embedding coaching on a shoestring and surviving during times when budgets are under pressure
·Developing, sourcing and maximizing the use of coaching to meet your organization's business needs
·Creating a compelling business case for sustaining coaching
·Making coaching a part of managers' everyday skill-sets
·Evaluating the results and benefits of coaching

Find out more on the book's website, www.managingcoachingatwork.com

PART ONE

Contexts

01 What is coaching?

Introduction

This book is about the task of sustaining, managing and growing an existing coaching initiative as much as introducing it for the first time. It concerns using coaching as a tactical or strategic means for achieving a beneficial purpose within an organization.

We’ll pay attention to circumstances where it may be necessary to revitalize a flagging initiative as well as to situations in which setting a new direction is needed to keep pace with changes occurring within the business. We’ll examine the challenges involved in evaluating the effectiveness and impacts of coaching and suggest what can be done to limit these. Finally, we’ll consider how the collective experience of individuals who manage, deliver or receive coaching across an organization can position it to better direct opportunities for coaching to drive both people and business performance.

The tips, techniques and guidance that we suggest draw heavily on the insights of others as well as from our own experiences. We are indebted to those who generously gave their time to contribute case studies specifically for this book, but also to many others who took part in consultations to relate lessons from their own coaching programmes.

Their experiences, described in the feature boxes peppered throughout the book, cover widely different applications and interpretations of coaching, and feature case studies from the smallest of organizations to the largest of multinationals. Public, private and third sector organizations are all represented, the shared insights relate to experiences of coaching practice from organizations around the world.

Our own learnings have come out of acting both as consultants and trainers to individuals responsible for developing coaching capabilities within their own organizations and in Jackie’s case as a former ‘staffo’ (staff officer), responsible for leading a project to roll out a brand-new coaching practice in the London Metropolitan Police Service too.

One of the difficulties of writing a text such as this is that the needs of each organization and so the operating context for every coaching project are different, even if many similar challenges may be faced by those who are at similar stages in their coaching implementations.

We can’t promise a single, prescriptive ‘one size fits all’ approach to making coaching work either, but rather we hope that by highlighting the wide range of considerations that any leader of any coaching initiative may want to concern themselves with and by providing a comprehensive range of templates to draw upon, this book will serve as a valuable reference to help them with their task. We can’t promise that making coaching an everyday practice from top-to-bottom in any organization will be an easy task, and we aim to give realistic guidance for those who may find themselves as lone voices, attempting to further the coaching cause with limited budgets and having little more than lip-service support from senior-level sponsors.

Checklists of topics that project leaders might find useful are brought together at the end of the book (Appendix B). These are intended to include full ‘shopping lists’, even if some items are optional considerations and others don’t apply to every type of coaching project. Some degree of discretion is therefore needed to choose which items are relevant and practical for your particular needs.

The book is organized into three main parts:

• Part One considers the organizational contexts for using coaching, exploring the concept of setting an agenda to align coaching applications with business needs and discussing the relevance of choosing between different levels of aspiration in deciding how to focus a coaching project. The potential need to identify different interpretations of what ‘coaching’ is and factors that might indicate why coaching may be preferred over other interventions such as training and mentoring are considered in Chapters 1 and 2.
• Part Two provides guidance on implementing a coaching initiative – not just where coaching is being introduced for the first time, but also where concerted action is needed to set a fresh direction. The tasks of operating an ongoing coaching service are considered, as is the challenge of sustaining and developing coaching as a management style.
• Part Three puts the spotlight on capitalizing on what is learnt through coaching, emphasizing especially the role of audit and evaluation. A method for assessing the effectiveness and impact of coaching is described and a means for ensuring that a coaching practice remains fit for purpose is also outlined.

Readers who have already embarked upon a coaching programme or who are well acquainted with the principles of coaching may find that there’s much that will be familiar to them in the first two chapters. Even though just a skim read of these opening pages may be appropriate for such readers, we suggest that it will be worth at least reconsidering what is meant by coaching and why coaching may be a preferable intervention for addressing particular needs over others.

Defining coaching

Before we can start considering how to implement coaching, we might start by asking: What is coaching?

Unfortunately, for many, finding an answer to this question has proved to be quite an elusive task: put 10 coaches in a room, and the chances are that you’ll be offered 10 different versions of what coaching actually is! Indeed, there are possibly as many definitions of what coaching is as there are coaches, though hopefully there’ll be a fair degree of common ground between these!

A quick glance at the myriad of attempts to create a Rubicon definition that can be accepted by all illustrates the dilemma that many have encountered. Michael Jay offers us: ‘in the simplest terms, the coach is someone who uses coaching knowledge, skills and abilities without responsibility, accountability or authority over the outcomes of the person being coached while seeking to co-generate well-being, purpose, competence and awareness as a result of a coaching interaction’ (Jay, 1999).

Meantime, Richard Kilburg weighs in with a definition for executive coaching: ‘a helping relationship formed between a client who has managerial authority and responsibility in an organization and a consultant who uses a wide variety of behavioural techniques and methods to help clients achieve a mutually identified set of goals to improve his or her professional performance and personal satisfaction and, consequently, to improve the effectiveness of the client’s organization within a formally defined coaching agreement’ (Kilburg, 1996). Next, Loehr and Emerson (2008) give us ‘[helping] another person reach higher performance by creating a dialogue that leads to awareness and action’.

Dig a little deeper, and the definitions become more elaborate still – and so too, more and more perplexing for a newcomer to fathom.

Eric Parsloe is amongst the body of coaching commentators who prefer to avoid seeking a definitive explanation of what coaching is, although he offers a preferred version: ‘coaching is a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve. To be successful, a coach requires a knowledge and understanding of the processes as well as the variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place’ (Parsloe, 1999).

Another thoughtful definition comes from Whitmore: ‘coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them’ (Whitmore, 2002). Perhaps more simply, we might adopt a view that ‘coaching is [about] the conversation, not the tool’.

What is useful about these offerings is that they begin to pick out the bones of what gives coaching its power, or what it is that makes coaching work for many people.

We might also talk about ‘life coaching’ (‘a purposeful conversation that inspires you to create the life you want’ (Burn, 2007)), ‘executive coaching’ (‘the art and science of facilitating the personal development, learning and performance of an executive’ (Dembkowski, 2006)), ‘leadership coaching’, ‘performance coaching’ and ‘transformational coaching’, to name just a few. Then there are differing coaching practices to consider as well – ‘solutions focus coaching’, ‘cognitive-behavioural coaching’ and ‘appreciative coaching’ amongst them.

Our own favourite choice of words is offered by Naked Leader author David Taylor in his own take on organizational coaching, The Naked Coach: ‘[business coaching is] any and every intervention that enables people, teams and organizations to be their very best’ (Taylor, 2007).

For the coaching purist, Taylor’s somewhat blunt explanation may be lacking substance. On its own, this definition doesn’t distinguish coaching from ‘mentoring’, ‘counselling’, ‘training’ and a variety of other interventions.

We believe that his offering at least encourages us to get to the heart of what coaching is meant to be about – helping people move forward, and in a way that taps into their inner personal resources and self-potential. This is where coaching often has an edge over other approaches: it gives insight and inspiration, challenging people to search inside for answers and to gain satisfaction and increased motivation when they find them. This is also why coaching has built up such a strong fan base within organizations – it really offers the power to change people in both the short and the long term, both for their own good and for the good of their organization.

So you may be wondering what our own contribution to the lexicon of coaching definitions might be! While not wanting to be deliberately evasive, we prefer to concur with some commentators that the best definition of coaching is the one that works for you and your organization. As we’ll see later, the ways in which organizations have applied their meaning of coaching have taken widely differing starting points. It’s not for us to say whose choice of words is right or wrong.

Nevertheless, it’s helpful to consider the telltale signs that charact...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Praise
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of Contents
• List of case studies
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Contexts
• Part Two: Implementation
• Part Three: Outcomes
• Appendix A: Templates and micro-tools
• Appendix B: Checklists for implementing, managing and developing a coaching service
• Appendix C1: Coaching associations
• Appendix C2: Coaching journals and periodicals
• References
• Copyright