The Coaching Connection

A Manager's Guide to Developing Individual Potential in the Context of the Organization

John Hoover, Paul Gorrell

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780814414156
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Traditional coaching methods have focused entirely on the individual--sometimes even at the expense of improving measurable business results for the company. Now, authors John Hoover and Paul J. Gorrell, both notable leaders and talent experts, show managers how they can use contextual coaching to ensure both individuals and organizations experience the highest probability for success. Contextual coaching uses a dual-focus systems approach to align coaching processes with the strategies, cultural imperatives, talent management systems, communication practices, and competency requirements of an entire organization. The Coaching Connection teaches readers how to apply this methodology by taking all of these factors into consideration within their own organizational context. When coaching initiatives are successful, individual and organizational interests become one. Including a 360-degree assessment covering the ten most essential skill sets of well-balanced and effective leaders, as well as systems for measuring and managing talent, The Coaching Connection helps companies improve both their people--and their bottom line results.

CHAPTER 1

A Coaching Culture

“Executive coaching is the most powerful tool we have to transform a good leader into a great one, and is one of the best investments we can make. A leader who doesn’t embrace coaching is a leader who’s likely reached his or her peak.”

—Mark Effron
VP, Talent Management Avon Products

If you are a manager or executive who is responsible for the performance of others, one of the most critical functions you can perform on behalf of your organization is to provide the guidance, encouragement, and support to bring out the best that your people have to offer your organization and the customers you serve. Whether you are an experienced coach in the workplace or a manager who is in the process of developing or improving this invaluable individual- and organization-enhancing practice, coaching places you and the individual recipient (or small group of recipients) at the flashpoint where individuals and teams come face to face with their real potential.

Although coaching for executives and midlevel people has become increasingly popular, especially over the past twenty years, we still find it remarkable that many businesspeople have yet to be directly involved with business coaching, on either side of the equation. That means there is a huge growth opportunity for those who can produce the type of tremendous individual and organizational improvement that coaching is capable of yielding.

The Contextual Coaching model that you will become familiar with throughout this book is a balanced approach to developing a well-rounded leadership skill set to establish and maintain reasonable expectations among individuals, teams, and the leaders who represent the thinking and strategy of the organization. When expectations are reasonable, attainable, and worthwhile, people find it far easier to maintain their own equilibriums and to engage more consistently in positive and productive behavior.

Not only will this book be extremely helpful to you as a coach, but it can also help your coaching clients to understand and derive greater benefit from the process. Coaching is a dance of sorts between you and those you coach. However, that does not necessarily mean that the coach always leads.

Ginger Rogers, apparently tired of hearing endless accolades about her perennial dance partner, Fred Astaire, is said to have pointed out, “Anything he does, I do backwards and in high heels.” The coaching engagement is a relationship, primarily between two people or between a coach and a small group or team. Whereas the coach often leads, the one being coached is doing anything but moving backward. What is true for one is true for the other. The benefits of Contextual Coaching accrue to everyone, regardless of whether they are dancing forward, backward, to the right, or to the left. So read on, absorb, and learn, regardless of your role in the coaching engagement.

Coaching, as an enterprise-wide, organizational initiative, might have tapped you as a coach-at-large, a mentor, an onboarding specialist, or a career coach or put you in some other advisory or guidance role. Although you already coach your direct reports in various ways, if you are to craft an organization-wide culture of coaching, you’ll need to become part of a deliberate, methodical, systematic, and strategic application of coaching to do these and other functions:

Onboard a new team member.¹

Address specific performance and productivity issues.

Improve a person’s habits.

Expand a person’s knowledge and skill set.

Help someone choose more productive activities in which to engage.

Develop leadership potential.

Prepare a high-potential person for promotion.

Prepare a high-potential person for succession.

Help people make domestic and international geographical transitions.

Help a colleague or direct report deal with stress and anxiety on the job.

Help a colleague or direct report find assistance with personal problems.

Help a person understand and put to good use personality assessment data.

Help people understand their 360-degree feedback and put it to good use.

Help people understand and better fulfill their roles in the big-picture strategy.

Help people get to the core of their dysfunctional attitudes and revise perceptions and expectations until those attitudes improve.

Other leading demands for coaching arise from a number of the other issues mentioned in the preceding list. Acceleration or developmental coaching is usually a matter of taking people from the productive place where they are and expanding their skill sets, developing more of their potential, strengthening their competencies, and increasing their capabilities. Acceleration or developmental business coaching makes something that is good even better.

A 2008 study conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) found that most coaching engagements are for acceleration purposes rather than remedial work. The study, “Coaching: A Global Study of Successful Practices,” surveyed more than 1,000 business leaders around the world and found increasing use of coaching as a means of improving individual productivity. Nearly 60 percent of North American companies use coaching for high potentials frequently or a great deal, and about 42 percent use coaching of executives to the same extent. These percentages were higher in the international sample. Only 37 percent of North American respondents and fewer than 30 percent of international respondents said they used coaching to help problem employees.

No matter what precipitates or drives the coaching engagement, the thing that makes the coaching contextual is the alignment between the design and execution of the coaching and the overarching strategy of the organization. Coaching in business environments is not about making a client feel good. We stipulate that a quality coaching engagement will more than likely leave everyone involved feeling better about themselves and what they do in the organization. However, the individual and the organization that pays for the coaching must both benefit for the engagement to be considered a true success.

An individual’s success in business begins with adding value to the organization. To coach your people without regard for the organization’s needs does a disservice to the individual by limiting the value he or she can add. Limiting the value an individual or team of individuals can add also diminishes their career potential. In any of these cases, the organization loses right along with the individual. When coaching clients get seriously better at what they do, both they and the organization win.

Keeping the Coach in Context

You will soon learn and understand how coaching people within the context of their working environments and their organizational cultures positions them and their organizations for the most positive outcomes. If performance or behavioral issues are in question, the modifications must also be in the context of organizational strategy to do the most good for the organization and your client’s career. If career acceleration is the goal, the coaching must always be done in the context of the organization’s needs, since career enhancement is inexorably tied to organizational success. Sometimes, business coaching is simply a matter of making periodic course corrections. As with performance improvement and career acceleration, course corrections must be calibrated to the flight plan and navigational markers of the organization.

For coaching to be most effective and to provide the best return on the coaching investment, regardless of the immediate rationale, every aspect of the coaching engagement must resonate with the grand organizational scheme. Organizations have mission statements that describe what they do and vision statements that describe where they want to grow. What organizations need to stay true to their mission and vision statements varies from organization to organization, depending upon their individual charters. Contextual Coaching can be described as aligning what people do best with what organizations need most. As a coach or a manager who coaches, you must always be sensitive to both sides of that equation.

When an organization embarks on creating and sustaining a coaching culture, such alignment is never left to chance. It is deliberate, intentional, and strategically planned. If your organization is adopting a coaching culture, the alignment between what your people do best with what your organization needs most is the big-picture agenda in which you are being asked to participate.

It is the perfect symbiotic relationship. Each one needs the other. In Contextual Coaching, the individual’s coaching is always in the context of the organization and the organization’s goals, needs, and/or strategic agenda. If the organization is not considered, you are talking about therapy, not coaching. The coaching culture you are engendering in your organization must first account for the context of the prevailing culture. It is only when an individual’s attitudes or behaviors are assessed against the context of the prevailing culture that you can measure gaps in performance or the potential for leadership development.

Helping the Organization Through
Habits, Skills, and Activities

Besides generally educating and raising awareness, there are three primary categories within which people contribute to or detract from the success of the organization—three ways they enhance or inhibit the alignment between what individuals do best and what their organizations need most: habits, skills, and activities.

Habits

Habits are those things that people do repeatedly (good or bad, positive or negative, helpful or a hindrance) until they become second nature. As the saying goes: Good habits are hard to adopt and easy to abandon; bad habits are easy to adopt and hard to abandon. Unfortunately, we have not come across a magical solution to reverse this truth.

Habits play out unconsciously most of the time. Every one of us does any number of things unconsciously each day. How often have you stopped yourself or had a colleague stop you and ask, “What are you doing?” or “Why are you doing that?” without having a good answer? If this happens to you, it is probably because you are doing something out of unconscious routine that does not make sense in the moment or under the circumstances. You are so oblivious to your own actions at tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Coaching Culture
• Chapter 2: The Basics of Contextual Coaching
• Chapter 3: Area of Behavioral Focus: Strategy
• Chapter 4: Area of Behavioral Focus: Structure
• Chapter 5: Area of Behavioral Focus: Culture
• Chapter 6: Area of Behavioral Focus: Communication
• Chapter 7: Area of Behavioral Focus: Talent Systems
• Chapter 8: Area of Behavioral Focus: Talent Solutions
• Chapter 9: Area of Behavioral Focus: Development
• Chapter 10: Area of Behavioral Focus: Team Dynamics
• Chapter 11: Area of Behavioral Focus: Career
• Chapter 12: Area of Behavioral Focus: Competence
• Epilogue
• Index