Coaching used to be the Black Hole. People would go behind the curtain and organisations would cross their fingers,” says Peyton Daniel, managing director of executive coaching for Drake Beam Morin (DBM). “But increasingly coaching is being embraced by organisations in the US,” he says.
Bob Lee, head of the i-coach academy in New York, agrees: “Coaching is on everyone’s agenda everywhere at professional meetings.”
The trend away from command-and-control organisational cultures and the competition for talent are among the factors fuelling interest in coaching in the US. Over the past three years, 71 per cent of large US companies surveyed by HR consulting firm BeamPines in 2005 reported that the demand for coaching has risen substantially (42 per cent) or slightly (29 per cent).
Diana Sullivan, senior vice president in the talent solutions group of global career management firm Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH), says companies in the US are waking up to the importance of coaching to help retain staff.
While coaching in the US was previously offered on an ad-hoc basis, there has been a “dramatic shift” over the past three years, says Sullivan, towards coaching being aligned within the business context.
Lehman Brothers (page 30) and Credit Suisse (above right) exemplify this approach, with coaching increasingly playing centre stage in leadership development activity and strategy shaping.
Bruce Sevy, senior consultant for the Hay Group in Chicago, believes the US is trailing behind the UK marginally when it comes to tying coaching into wider business and HR strategies. But if this is the case, the transatlantic gap is closing rapidly. Kim Livesay, a spokeswoman for the US’s leading coaching professional body, the International Coach Federation (ICF), reports that a number of US-based companies are doing “a very good job” tying coaching to employee development, change management, sales effectiveness and internal leadership.
Coaching is increasingly used to help develop future leaders. Sevy says: “Organisations in the US are starting to get much more serious about succession planning and are using coaching to help candidates be ready.”
Tracking trends
More and more US organisations particularly the larger ones are tracking trends which emerge across multiple coaching assignments, without the nervousness some UK businesses manifest about breaching confidentiality.
As Daniel who provides support for DBM’s East Region in the US, says: “US companies are concentrated on having the best talent so they have to be able to show prospective employees that there is movement within the organisation. If leaders are not developing their people, you can’t have the dynamic that is critical to be successful. And one way is to train managers is to have effective coaching skills.”
“Many times what is found in the executive coaching engagement is that part of the problem or challenge is to do with how the person’s manager is managing.”
Companies typically collate non-confidential data such as where the coach and client are in the process, frequency of meetings, key observations and development plans. Organisations increasingly appreciate that the latter can be an important window onto the coaching process.
“This is the real fulcrum of the coaching engagement and is an appropriate one to share with all the stakeholders so that they can reinforce this,” says Daniel.
Away from remedial work
Over the past decade, the pendulum has swung away from using coaching for remedial work towards developmental work.
“It’s no longer, ‘I’m a problem child’, but ‘coaching will give me some good information which allows me to get better at what I do’,” says Hope Greenfield of Lehman Brothers.
Professor Lew Stern, chairman of professional body the Executive Coaching Forum (ECF), agrees: “Some 70 or 80 per cent of the executive and leadership coaching my colleagues and I were giving used to be related to holes in people’s capability.
“But this has reversed itself over the past three to five years,” he says. Nowadays, he explains, such coaching is used primarily for people in key leadership roles who have significant potential or have taken on new responsibility, as well as very senior executives and middle managers in the succession planning pool.
Towards more targeted coaching
Over the past three to four years the large companies who started their coaching initiatives five to 10 years ago are increasingly using a much more targeted coaching technique, according to Stern. “They’ re identifying key places where their resources can be best used,” he says.
LHH’s Sullivan says targeted coaching typically lasts about six sessions and is more around core skills or an event coming up such as building a strategic team, leading virtually, accelerating strategy and innovation.
“Coaching leaders and middle managers for innovation is very popular right now in the US,” she says.
Feedback coaching is becoming increasingly widespread, often as part of leadership development. Airline company JetBlue Airways is currently putting all its leaders through a three-day Principles of Leadership in Action leadership programme, built around the company’s five ‘guiding principles’. On the third day, participants are given feedback by one of 15 coaches accredited with the i-coach academy in New York with the aim of developing an action plan.
But according to Sevy, there is still some blurring in many organisations between run-of-the-mill assessment and feedback coaching.
“We often get a call saying ‘can we give coaching?’ and it means going through some feedback rather than helping people identify issues and working through these with them.”
Stern says that instead of coaching mid-level managers, those companies who first started coaching five or 10 years ago are identifying 20 to 30 people to be coached because of certain strategic issues that have been highlighted.
Meanwhile, Stern says that many organisations from non-financial, healthcare and educational sectors are now starting to do coaching. And unlike their predecessors, they are not going for coaching wholesale; they are learning lessons from the first wave.
Stern breaks down coaching activity in the US equally into the following sections:
- Coaching people who are ‘derailing’, who need significant help
- High potential leaders from middle management up to director level who are in the succession planning pool
- Senior leaders who receive coaching because of their seniority and strategic success
- ‘On-boarding’ coaching for employees given new roles
- Imparting new skills such as ‘compensation’ (remuneration) skills.
Bringing coaching in-house
Companies in the US, particularly large companies in the financial sector, increasingly use HR and internal people to deliver most of their coaching, using external people in more difficult cases, says Stern.
Sullivan says: “We are seeing the trend of leaders having more conversations and coaching the entire organisation around change taking place in the business, which is exciting because you can take it to a new level.”
Just as in the UK, the US is witnessing a surge in the amount of companies developing the role of manager as coach and, according to the BeamPines survey, there is a clear interest in developing internal coaching capability and an acknowledgement of the value it can provide. The study did, however, highlight concern regarding the skill and training of internal coaches.
The main drivers for establishing an internal coaching programme were cost (60 per cent); a need for knowledge of the business (46.7 per cent) and the number of employees to be coached (46.7 per cent).
Professor Stern says: “Another trend is the increasing focus on developing managers’ capability to coach, along with that of the HR professional as coach and partnering between the internal and external and the internal and the manager.”
The ICF says the use of manager as coach is very common in the US, with the verbs ‘coach’ and ‘mentor’ showing up in many managers’ job descriptions. But it says that ‘internal coach’ is not always recognised as a separate post.
DBM’s Daniel says internal coaching in the US is where external coaching was five years ago: “All large organisations have established or are contemplating establishing a pool of internal certified coaches. They are experimenting with how to get the most impact and are tending to reserve these coaches for areas such as feedback coaching after 360-degree appraisal.”
Sullivan says: “We are seeing a lot more of this. And there are a couple of ways to do it. One is via universities which have programmes for coaching training. When you transfer capability down to many managers, you will get the impact and the shift towards a more developmental culture. People in the US are very excited about being part of that.”
JetBlue Airways is starting to build a cadre of internal coaches which it will use alongside external coaches. Kim Lehmbeck, supervisor, leadership development, says: “We are really excited about this. The level of employee determines whether leadership coaching is internal or external.”
So far, the five-year-old company has five ‘leadership facilitators’ – internal coaches, who have been accredited by the i-coach academy in New York, plus a pool of 10 preferred external coaches to coach highly senior executives.
Standards
The move towards standardisation and harmonisation of the profession is gathering pace on both sides of the Atlantic.
Daniel highlights a trend among US-based organisations to identify and share best practice in coaching, setting consistent standards around this. Increasingly, he says, organisations are “looking to others to see what is working and that is helping to propel them forward”. Companies in the US often prefer their coaches to be accredited by the ICF.
Bob Lee (the Lee formerly of Lee Hecht Harrison) says: “As with all new services, coaching is coming under pressure to be institutionalised. People want to standardise it and have people lower down doing it, manuals and internal coaching.”
Increasingly, US companies are tightening up selection criteria and building pools of preferred suppliers, as JetBlue has done.
“We are seeing a lot more networking between organisations. Different coaches are good at different things,” Stern says.
DBM’s Daniel notes: “Organisations are beginning to establish clear guidelines, to ask all the important questions up-front, paying attention to when and when not to coach.”
David Peterson at PDI says: “Some organisations are asking coaches to declare their expertise so coaches are starting to say they are experts in influencing skills or they are a leadership, content or learning coach.”
Eighty-six per cent of respondents to BeamPines’ research said that having a business background was most important for an external coach, followed by being a psychologist (50 per cent), or having an organisational development background (45 per cent).
Evaluation
The US is further ahead than the UK in evaluation and people are getting more comfortable with it, but some organisations are still scared, according to LHH’s Sullivan.
“Lots of people, especially in HR, are still not comfortable with evaluation. The view is that you can’t quantify behaviour.”
Stern says: “It is slow on evaluation because nobody is forcing the issue. If anything it is the executive coaches who are encouraging this.”
When he pushes his clients to evaluate, they hesitate for two reasons: “They don’t want to break confidentiality and it costs money and time.”
But the tide is turning, just as it is in the UK. Daniels says the best organisations are starting coaching assignments by putting qualitative and quantitative Return On Investment (ROI) measures up front, including measuring positive changes in people’s perceptions, or using measures with ‘more teeth’ including increases in productivity or sales.
Sullivan highlights the work in evaluation being done by Dr Theresa Welbourne, editor in chief of Human Resource Management, which is published by the University of Michigan in partnership with the Society of Human Resource Management. Dr Welbourne has set up eepulse to help companies measure aspects such as the energy of their workforces and the enthusiasm of their customers.
Mentoring
Mentoring has a long history in the US, having become popular there before it took off in the UK. Elizabeth Holloway, professor of psychology, leadership and change at Antioch University in the US says that in the 1970s, mentoring was developed in the US as a strategy to boost the number of women at senior level but come the 1980s, research showed that women were failing to prosper at middle management level.
“What happened was that it was the men who needed to be the mentors and co-workers questioned the interests of the men and women in these relationships,” she said, speaking at the Oxford School of Coaching & Mentoring’s (OSC&M) annual conference on 14 June. People would say things such as: “She’s just riding on a man’s coat tail” or “What did you expect with an affirmative action hire?” She said a desire to retain knowledge is a major driver behind the substantial corporate investment in mentoring, although she says mentoring can offer much more. “
There is a concern in the US about losing institutional knowledge and mentoring is seen as an opportunity to grow from within and retain knowledge value,” she said: “I don’t think mentoring has hit its full potential to enhance the lives of individuals and foster creativity and innovation at the corporate level.”
Telephone coaching
The large distances in the US, cost issues, plus a fast pace of life have contributed to a growth in telephone coaching, particularly for middle management. The ICF says that coaching is commonly done via the phone. Sevy says that cost is often a reason to use telephone coaching: “Typically when feedback coaching is required for large populations there will be issues around cost, so that is often done over the phone.”
Telephone coaching has its opponents, including Greenfield of Lehman Brothers. But Diane Brennan, vice president of the ICF, is a convert: “When I first started coaching, I couldn’t imagine how it would work, but now I have clients I’ve never met and it is amazing how effective it is.”
Coach training
University courses have also expanded and are available at universities including, Georgetown University, Wharton School, University of Texas, New York University and Fielding Graduate University. Most offer classroom-based accreditation programmes. BeamPines’ Masters Program in Executive Coaching, which it offers in conjunction with Middlesex University, is currently the only accredited masters programme available.
“There are many lightweight coaching programmes around in the US and the problem is that the way to learn to coach is by coaching and getting supervised. In the US, people tend to get dipped in just one or two models then go out to apply only those few,” explains Joshua Ehrlich, dean of BeamPines’ Master’s Program in Executive Coaching.
But this attitude to training in the US is changing. Professor Stern says he is seeing more and more people being trained in the US in multi-disciplinary approaches. As the US coaching profession matures, it is becoming increasingly grounded in the latest research in neuroscience, positive psychology, adult development, learning theory, management and organisational theory and systems theory.
Brennan says: “As we’ve evolved as coaches, we are becoming much more focused on research, connecting what we do with practice and there is a clear influence from humanistic psychology and positive psychology, cognitive behavioural therapy and so on.
“Positive psychology and the work of people like Martin Seligman are at the forefront now.”
Raising standards
A group of academic leaders recently joined forces to form the Graduate School Alliance for Executive Coaching (GSAEC). The school’s aim is to set standards for coach education and training in academic institutions. The group plans its first major conference next spring. It aims to build links with similar academic standard-setting organisations for executive coaching worldwide.
The founding members of the Alliance include the School of Human and Organization Development at Fielding Graduate University; Franklin University’s Ross School of Management; the School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas; and the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology.
Meanwhile, the Executive Coaching Forum has developed a core competency framework for executive coaches which took 18 months to develop. So what is the predicted future of coaching in the US? Daniel says: “What is absolutely certain is that coaching will change and will become more focused as people have more experience with it and see where it works most effectively. It is most definitely not a fad.”
Volume 1, Issue 5