Executive Coaching for Results

The Definitive Guide to Developing Organizational Leaders

Brian O Underhill

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781605098784
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: R&D

The field of executive coaching is growing at an astonishing rate. Corporations are increasingly turning to coaching as an intervention, as it offers leaders and managers both on-the-job learning and built-in follow-up. But how can you make the best use of coaching within your organization? Executive Coaching for Results helps this critical leadership development method come of age. This is not a "how-to-coach book"—there are already plenty of those—but rather a comprehensive guide on how to strategically use coaching to maximize development of talent and link the impact of coaching to bottom-line results. Underhill, McAnally, and Koriath draw on their rigorous original research (through Executive Development Associates) with Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies such as Disney, IBM, UBS, Unilever and many others,
and combine that with their years of industry experience to advance the state of the art. Executive Coaching for Results includes topics such as:
Integrating coaching into your organization's overall leadership development strategy
Locating and screening coaches worldwide
Developing an internal coaching program
Deciding which coaching assessments and instruments are appropriate to your situation
Measuring the impact and ROI of coaching
Following up after coaching Throughout, the authors provide numerous examples from major organizations such as Dell, Johnson and Johnson, Intel, and Wal-Mart. Offering practical learning, best practices, and illuminating case studies, this is the first definitive guide to the effective use of executive coaching in the corporate environment.

1 • Understanding the Coaching Field

The word coach derives from 15th-century Hungary,¹ referring to the village of Kocs, where fine transportation coaches were first constructed. The purpose of a coach was to transport people from where they were to where they wanted to go.

Similarly, executive coaches facilitate the transportation of leaders to new levels of development and effectiveness. The optimal conditions for the journey include an integrated organizational system and human resources (HR) or leadership development (LD) practitioners to facilitate the journey, a coach trained and appropriate for the job, and a leader eager (or at least willing) to be transported somewhere.

A good place to start is to set the executive coaching foundation and build from there. What is coaching? Why do coaching? Who receives coaching? We’ll take a further look into these basics in this chapter.

What Is Coaching?

Scroll through the academic, consulting, and other literature and you will find about as many definitions of executive coaching as there are coaches in the marketplace. Here are a few examples:

The essence of executive coaching is helping leaders get unstuck from their dilemmas and assisting them to transfer their learning into results for the organization.²—Mary Beth O’Neil

Action coaching is a process that fosters self—awareness and that results in the motivation to change, as well as the guidance needed if change is to take place in ways that meet organizational needs.³—Dotlich and Cairo

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 behavioral techniques and methods to help the client 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.⁴—Kilberg

Executive Coaching is a one-on-one training and collaborative relationship between a certified or self-proclaimed coach and an executive interested in improving him—or herself primarily in career or business related skills.⁵—Wikipedia, today’s leading “Web 2.0” resource for user—generated content

We see executive coaching much more simply and offer this definition:

Executive coaching is the one—to—one development of an organizational leader.

Executive coaching is one leader, one coach. The purpose is the development of the leader’s skills, and executive coaching is intended for organizational leaders (whether or not they are in actual leadership positions). It doesn’t matter if the company is large or small; for profit or nonprofit; private, governmental, or publicly held—the purpose remains the same.

Most emerging disciplines face a great variation in definitions. But there is no doubt that the practice of executive coaching is here permanently, regardless of how it is defined.

The Purpose of Coaching—Why?

Many leaders believe that they need to get a coach, without fully understanding why they need one. Plenty of organizations are guilty of this, too.

What is the point of coaching? Why do companies hire coaches?

At conference presentations, we often meet corporate practitioners asking about the different types of coaching. The confusion is understandable—there are lots of reasons to hire a coach. One executive development manager put it this way: “Executive coaching could be anything from building and sustaining leadership capacity, which is very difficult in these challenging times—to an executive with a leadership issue that needs remediation—to a leader in transition who is moving into a new role.”

The top reason companies hire coaches is to develop the leadership capabilities of their executives. In our research, organizations, leaders, and coaches unanimously agreed that this is the primary purpose of coaching.

On a much smaller scale, coaching is also used to enhance career development, fix performance problems, retain high—potential employees, and manage leadership transitions.

A company’s human resources or leadership development group can be of tremendous help in identifying how coaching will be used and linking it to the company’s business strategies.

Let’s review the leading answers from the research regarding the purpose of coaching (Fig. 3).

Leadership Development

Our study findings confirmed leadership development to be the clear purpose of most coaching engagements. The good news is that organizations and coaches were in nearly exact agreement regarding this point. They ranked leadership development the clear winner and agreed on the relative importance of the remaining options.

Leader Transition

Leader transitions, such as promotions, lateral moves, or international assignments, are all coaching opportunities. The scarcity of leadership talent combined with the rapid international expansion of many organizations requires leaders to make successful transitions quickly.

Playing off the success of The First 90 Days⁶ and other books, more organizations are using coaches to facilitate leader transitions. One organization explained that they are now “doing some coaching around transitions and promotions or movements in the organization when we send somebody off on an expatriate assignment.”

Other firms automatically assign a coach when a major transition occurs. One company says, “We use coaching as a development strategy, oftentimes aligned with new leader transitions—those who are stepping up into a new role—to make sure that they are set up for success in that important first year.”

Figure 3. Purpose of cocahing—organization, leader, and coach perspectives.

We expect that more companies will begin to use coaching to help leaders transition between positions, with new promotions, or to help them during orientation (on-boarding) to a new environment. For example, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans has made good use of coaches during on—boarding transitions.

Using Coaches for Transitions

Kristin Olsen Thrivent Financial for Lutherans

At Thrivent Financial for Lutherans we use executive coaches as part of our Start Right program—our roadmap for on-boarding new senior sales leaders. Start Right has two key components that make up what we refer to as the 100-day plan—the development and initial implementation of a business plan for their region, and the identification and launching of their new team. An executive coach is provided to help support the execution of the plan and to create and begin the implementation of an individual development plan. The coach is in place for the first six months post-transition.

Transitions often involve a geographic move. We provide a coach in the area where they now live; an added benefit providing an opportunity to learn more about and build relationships in their new city.

Initially, we took the approach that individuals could choose whether they would have an executive coach. But over time we have learned it is such an important element of their future success that we now require it. We typically provide information to new leaders about the transition coaching process and their coach within a few weeks of being named to their new role. We choose a coach for them, with the option of switching if the relationship isn’t working. This simplifies the process and gets the coach in place more quickly.

A fundamental step in the formation of the relationships is conversation between executive coaches and the sponsors/managers of individuals. The purpose of these calls is to provide the coaches with background about the nature of transition and key information that can contribute to the effectiveness of coaching. Because the leaders are in new positions and often don’t know what they don’t know, these conversations save time and contribute to the coaches’ understanding of their work and our organization.

The executive coach provides reinforcement at a time when derailing is a real possibility by ensuring that these two areas remain a top priority. The coach is essentially our secondary support system and safety net to ensure that the individual stays on track during this crucial time in his or her career.

High-Potential Retention

Many companies have realized the value of coaching for leadership development as a means of retaining executives. Offering coaching is viewed as demonstrating the company’s commitment to developing key leaders and internal talent. Leaders recognize the company’s investment in their success and appreciate receiving this individual attention.

It’s a win-win situation for both the leader and the company. The leader wins by receiving individual attention and increased developmental opportunity. The company wins with a faster-developing leader who is stronger, contributing to both current and future business. Several leaders we’ve met over the years credit coaching specifically as the reason they’ve stayed at their firms.

Performance Issues

In the early years, coaching was more often to correct an employee’s performance who had gotten off track (derailing). In some organizations, it is still used in this way. But the trend, and most certainly the desire of practitioners, is to use coaching as infrequently as possible for performance issues.

Many companies have decided that other performance management practices are more appropriate for correcting poor performance, and they now reserve coaching—and its investment costs—for stronger performers. One organization says that, “One of the biggest changes that we have been able to institute over the last five years is moving executive coaching from a remedial to a development tool.”

Companies that still use coaching to address performance problems may find a lack of interest in coaching from their star performers. Our recommendation is to discontinue the practice of performance problem coaching and reserve executive coaching only for those with bright futures at the company.

Career Coaching

Career coaching is primarily about assisting an individual with an assessment of where their career is now and where it may go next. This coaching is paid for by either individuals themselves or a company. Some well-known career management consultancies are now offering individualized coaching to support their efforts.

Leaders ranked career coaching as most frequently used after leadership development. Whereas companies want to use coaching for developing leaders, leaders also view coaching as a tool to personally enhance their individual careers. Interviewed leaders offered many comments about how the coaching experience played such a major role in their career development.

Many coaching programs exercise tight control regarding the purpose of coaching and the number of hours allocated to achieve that purpose. Coaching programs may enhance leader support by allowing a place and funds for such conversations during the engagement. One leader told us, “I think what a coach provides to me is a mirror—and facilitates me solving my own problems. I feel like I will always want a coach to work on my own development.”

Life Coaching

Life coaching focuses on assisting clients to set and achieve goals in other aspects of their life rather than focusing exclusively on business objectives. In these cases, people choose areas of their life to improve, such as obtaining a personal goal (i.e., overcoming a financial or physical challenge), successfully making changes or transitions (i.e., career planning or relationship changes), or helping them manage a part of their life better (i.e., stress or time management).

Life coaching is not therapy, and these coaches are not therapists—although therapists may also be life coaches. Life coaching is almost always funded by the individual.

We believe that the coaching industry is currently at a crossroads; life coaching and executive coaching will likely diverge into separate industries. Each would offer distinct practices, certification requirements, and unique value propositions to their respective customers.

Content-Specific Coaching

At times, coaching is used to enhance traditional training programs. We’ve seen examples such as time management coaching, public speaking, financial literacy, communication skills, etc. Corporations use coaching in this way to continue the learning after the classroom training by adding follow-on coaching sessions.

General Mills offers coaching through a variety of different programs. They have found great success in their personal productivity coaching, as Kevin Wilde explains in the following excerpt.

Getting Things Done: Personal Productivity Coaching

Kevin Wilde General Mills

General Mills provides coa...