Neal Young

In these hard, recession-hit times, we must maintain a soft approach to our coaching

A recession represents perhaps the most stringent of acid tests for any company, challenging not only its durability, but the values, ethics and training housed within it.

During a financial crisis, there is often a need to consolidate, retrench and cut resources, including employees. This leads to a dichotomous situation between the management wielding the knife and the workforce suffering the cuts.

Such clinical evaluations of the worth of each individual, product and service focus our attention on the hard, objective skills of leadership. However, we must not forget that a company is not simply a well-oiled machine operating through the skill of strong leadership, but a social network: the product of its employees.

We must remember the more subjective, softer skills of people management, employee engagement and leadership coaching, all of which will be needed as we emerge from the crisis.

Hard, objective leadership is important, but it represents only one part of the leadership equation. Strong management must come on top of an engaged workforce willing to weather the financial storm. This more elusive and intangible of elements, engagement, appears to be an accurate bellwether for the future stability of a company.

Repeated engagement has been shown to be positively correlated with both company performance and innovation, whereas a decline in operating income is usually accompanied by a decline in engagement. We must ensure that employee engagement is underpinned by the soft skills of leadership coaching.

One reason for limited data on employee engagement is due to its many forms of definition, which at present run to more than 20, according to research company, Harris Interactive. At its core, however, it is about fostering an attitude of collaboration and trust within a workforce through a focus on open, transparent and fair management.

The publication of the government’s MacLeod Report, Engaging for Success, has helped raise the profile of employee engagement and adds tangibility to its definition: highly engaged staff try 50 per cent harder and perform 20 per cent better, whereas disengaged employees cost UK businesses upwards of £40 billion a year.

Fostering employee engagement with the support of leadership coaching should receive as much attention as other forms of business training. Many of the UK’s leading customer-facing companies, from Tesco to Nando’s, are measuring and responding to engagement, ensuring their employees are at the heart of the business, and that leadership coaching, with its emphasis on awareness (self-awareness, awareness of others and organisational awareness) underpins this.

Leadership coaching shouldn’t be viewed as a self-contained support activity but as a core development approach in support of employee engagement, as the benefits of coaching can go beyond the client, servicing the needs of the company.

The message that is coming from the recession is clear: overlook the engagement of your employees at your peril. For while hard leadership skills may determine the success of a company in crisis, it is when the storm clears and the crisis abates that the unengaged might look to jump ship.

It will then become obvious just how important those soft skills are – and how important they have been.

Neal Young is an HR consultant and executive coach at Rosemark Associates 07984 182889 www.rosemarkassociates.com

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 2