It is acceptable for clients to talk about non-work issues and there needs to be client confidentiality but it is also acceptable for the company footing the bill to harvest data on organisational themes, felt the group of industry experts and HR/coach practitioners.The panellists gathered at Coaching at Work’s offices in central London on 25 September to discuss how best to leverage coaching. They agreed that attention to the context of coaching, self-awareness of the coaches and clarity of boundaries were important, along with the establishment of a company culture that lets coaching flourish. Coaching is primarily about a different way of talking and relating to one another, which has become much more important as organisations attempt to move away from command and control cultures, panellists agreed.
Eric Parsloe, of the Oxford Total Learning Group, said coaching was revolutionary: “It is about having very different kinds of conversations the simple thing is that you are giving two hours for people to stop and think; it’s no more complicated than that.” Adrian Starkey of DDI and Richard Bentley of the International Coach Federation felt coaching should also add value to an individual’s thinking or skills. Professor Elisabet Engellau of INSEAD, said: “However we define coaching, it comes down to interpersonal relationships. It’s what we must use when we try to manage and convince others how the hierarchy has gone.”
What was most important for organisations, however, as Carolanne Minashi of Citigroup pointed out, was that an intervention should succeed, whatever its name or definition: “From the organisation’s perspective, the most important thing is the effectiveness of the relationship in driving change.” The culture, however, needed to be ‘right’ and coaches had to understand and adapt their practice to the context. Professor Engellau said: “It’s important to understand the context and organisational culture. Some cultures might make it difficult to take coaching forward.” Sir John Whitmore, of Performance Consultants International, said that those organisations wanting to embed a coaching culture would naturally be the ones where the management style is based on, or approximates, a coaching style: “You could say it is a trust or a fear thing.” David Clutterbuck of Clutterbuck Associates expressed concern about the lack of literature on culture change, asking what the tipping point was in moving towards a coaching-orientated culture. Professor Engellau agreed creating the culture of trust necessary for coaching to flourish was always a challenge.
Coaching approach
Panellists agreed that while coaching is generally shifting from being a remedial measure, there is still a place for directiveness but only if the coach had high levels of self-awareness and avoids bringing their own preferences and opinions to the relationship. Sir John said: “It can be appropriate in coaching to be directive. If the building is on fire, I will say: ‘get out’. If you can retain the quality of the relationship, clients won’t be offended by the occasional burst of directiveness.” “I agree,” said Professor Engellau, “but if you lack personal insight or haven’t learned enough about what your own drivers are in life, you risk becoming directive in a way that pushes themes or issues.” The challenge in being a ‘baggage-free’ practitioner loomed large for most of the panellists. “We all kid ourselves we can be objective but inevitably we all bring in baggage,” said Starkey. “The trick is to know what better focus looks like for the client.” Bentley said: “If you are working with the client’s frame of reference, the insights and learnings are more powerful I agree, however, that we can’t avoid bringing in our own stuff. But since this informs the questions we ask which help to facilitate new thinking, you are in that sense already being directive in coaching.”
Managers-as-coaches
The panellists discussed the difficulties managers faced in juggling their role as coach with other roles. Minashi said managers were “stressed, over-tasked and time-starved and with the best will in the world do not have the time to do valued coaching.” She said she thought there was real value in creating a support structure to “enable them to be more effective”. Bentley and Sir John, however, both had a problem with the term ‘manager-as-coach’: “We tell them to manage in a coaching style and they are not coaches and can’t pretend to be,” said Bentley, pointing out that people will always want to show their best side to their managers, rather than vulnerabilities.
But Professor Stephen Palmer of City University’s Coaching Psychology Unit said: “Like it or not, the manager-as-coach is a reality.” He acknowledged there are potential boundary and confidentiality issues. He suspected few received supervision and recommended that instead of ignoring this, guidelines be developed. But he warned: “Let’s not make coaching as ‘precious’ as some forms of psychotherapy.”
Bentley said it was about codifying somehow what makes a good conversation built on coaching principles so the manager can coach others in using those skills. “By bringing these skills into the organisation, you are throwing the pebble in with skills and conversations and watching it ripple out.”
Who should be coached?
Professor Engellau highlighted the huge role of coaching in helping young managers’ move from a functional role into managing teams, which she saw as much harder than moving from vice president to CEO. Parsloe felt “coaching at the middle level” was where most impact was felt because it reached people who have lots of interfaces and therefore, conversations in the workplace. Clutterbuck said there were three fundamental questions when deciding who to target: where is the biggest risk of losing key talent; where is the biggest shift likely and where is the biggest cost of making poor decisions what Professor Stephen Palmer described as “looking for hotspots”.
Acceptable topics
The panellists discussed whether it was acceptable to talk about non-work matters within coaching sessions paid for by the employer. Starkey felt this was something of a hornet’s nest, given that the purpose of the investment in many cases is to enhance performance in the job. “The coach is contracted to help clients achieve their objectives through better focus, but this potentially raises problems about who the client is,” he said. “The simple rule is that the person paying is the real client,” suggested Parsloe. But Professor Engellau felt “there is very little coaching that doesn’t involve private and personal issues”. Minashi said it was inevitable that there would be a cross-over. She gave the example of a high potential employee who initially chose to apply new behaviours in a home situation and was then encouraged to apply them to peers. Panellists agreed that coaching people in the workplace should have a positive knock-on effect on their behaviour elsewhere. Bentley gave the example of managers going home happier, which contributes positively to family life.
Sustainability
Sir John said: “If we are working with organisations we may come in with strong interventions, but my objective is to make ourselves, as coaches, redundant.” Starkey agreed: “We have clear timelines and milestones with our clients which helps avoid dependency.” For coaching to be sustainable, Professor Engellau felt it was important to work with teams in a structured fashion to help them become self-managing: “I believe you can’t just look at the individual but how we work together.”
Bentley said that because the approach with teams was more likely to be in the form of discrete workshops, sometimes “the moment of insight can be lost on returning to the day to day role”. He said it is the repetition that embeds the new thinking or behaviours which is fundamental to coaching, “otherwise it’s elation on Sunday, deflation on Wednesday”.
Clutterbuck advocated leaving clients with challenging questions to mull over, to help drum in new learning: “It’s the chewing over the questions that takes them further and which drives the process inbetween.” Professor Engellau felt that team members, when committing to an action plan in the group, serve as support in the change process.
Confidentiality, clarity, transparency
“I think coaching provides a place where people can be honest if they are feeling concerned or nervous,” said Minashi, underlining the value of relationships with a third party. She now believed organisations need to be involved in what goes on behind closed doors: “I used to have the view that coaching should be utterly confidential and client-centred. Then the issue we saw with that was there was no-one from the centre who had oversight to look at whether coaches had a previous track record, whether there were co-dependency issues, how long the coaching has been going on, how much it costs,” she said. Panellists agreed on the need for transparency and an ethical approach in the coaching relationship. Bentley and Professor Palmer agreed that it was unethical to coach a client who is unaware that their employer planned for them to leave. But it was acceptable for clients to leave their employer after being coached and unethical for employers to penalise coaches if this happened, without their being alerted to this. “We need trust and integrity on both sides and no cloak and dagger stuff,” said Minashi. She said that this was one of the challenges facing organisations wanting to make the best of coaching, and so getting it right at point of entry was essential.
Harvesting data
Panellists agreed that while client confidentiality was paramount, it was acceptable for organisations to harvest data from coaching interactions at least at a group level. But Professor Engellau warned that this should be made clear upfront and that it was important it did something constructive with the data because if people thought nothing would be done, it would create distrust. Clutterbuck said organisations did not use the opportunity for supervision enough: “You need to get external coaches together for supervision and to bring some of the internal coaches together with them to increase effectiveness.” Minashi said that her organisation was now reaping the benefits of having a smaller group of trusted coaches: “It’s about looking for huge themes and there is some very useful data to feed back on overarching, consistent themes.”
Values
Panellists agreed the values of the coach, client and sponsor needed to be aligned. “Organisations need to work with coaches with whom their values are congruent,” said Starkey. Minashi, Sir John and Bentley agreed it was essential for coaches to be aware of their values before starting a coaching intervention so this can be achieved, otherwise “there is no benefit and coaching can become a Trojan horse,” said Bentley. Minashi said: “It’s important that we can tell clients we will only give them someone to work with who will be good for them.” Professor Palmer said clients needed to develop their own objectives: “Values are culturally bound. Who is to say what is right or wrong?” But Sir John said coaches had a responsibility to help client companies improve their values and to look at the bigger picture: “The role of coaching is bigger than any of us realise. We are at a very exciting transformational time. Coaches are the midwives of the transformation which will be so important for the planet over the next decade.”
The panellists
Richard Bentley
Director, International Coach Federation and coaching solutions director, Results Coaching Systems (Europe)
David Clutterbuck
Senior partner, Clutterbuck Associates
Steve Crabb
Editor, People Management
Professor Elisabet Engellau
INSEAD Global Leadership Centre
Liz Hall
Editor, Coaching at Work
Carolanne Minashi
Director, talent & diversity, Citigroup