Research showed that organisations needed a new leadership model rather than trying to rely on coaches using the old one to deliver the kind of leaders they required

Steve Crabb
Coaching suppliers are failing to be challenging enough when they agree contracts with client firms, according to research unveiled at the conference.

Lee Sears, strategic adviser to the CIPD, was part of a team at Bridge Consulting hired by a consortium of six global businesses to investigate why, despite huge investment in their leadership development programmes, they needed to hire an increasing proportion of their leaders externally.

The answer, Sears found, was that the organisations were using an outdated model of leadership: they were looking for expert leaders rather than learning leaders who had the resilience, ego maturity and enabling management style to be able to cope with fast-changing environments. “We’ve been producing executives when we should have been developing leaders,” one chief executive told Sears.

But the coaches working within these firms were failing to spot this disconnect between the organisations’ needs and the brief they were demanding. Worse, what was being delivered was coach- and session-focused. More than 500 leaders were interviewed in the six businesses; they reported that 85 per cent of the learning that they experienced through coaching happened in actual coaching sessions, and of that 90 per cent came about because of an intervention by the coach.

“In the course of professionalising coaching, we’ve somehow managed to produce vanilla contracting,” Sears told delegates. Out of more than a million employees, the team found 19 exemplars of the new leadership style that the organisations needed. All had had disruptive experiences early in their careers, such as working in developing countries.

They were healthier than average, more likely to be politically active or engaged in religion, and had a low “will to power”. They had the ability to approach each new problem as if it was the first time they’d encountered it; and they were seen as mavericks, who’d survived by staying below the radar. Of the 19, 11 were women and all were married with children.

Volume 4, Issue 2