By Liz Hall
Internal coaching has helped Grant Thornton shift to GROW from what its head of development described as ‘GROAN’, improving its previously “very mixed” leadership capability.
Joanne Long, head of development at the accountancy firm, said its coaching programme delivered with OCM has improved leaders’ interpersonal and coaching skills and reduced spend on external coaching, although she said it was impossible to locate the spend.
Long mapped out the business’s coaching strategy against the GROW model, contrasting this with the GROAN model: “Gripe – focusing on what’s wrong; Reminisce – about when things were better, even if they weren’t; Obstructive – refusal to help create a solution; Antagonistic – arguing the downsides, and Negative – a victim mentality stance.”
She was speaking at OCM’s CPD and supervision day on 30 June in Oxford. GROW played out as: Goal – to develop leadership capability; move towards a performance culture; development of coaching skills and self-awareness; Reality – mixed capability; top-level partner endorsement, recognition of the need to do something; Opportunities – to work with OCM to build a sustainable and impactful programme; and an appetite to move quickly, and The Way Forward – partnering with OCM to define its coaching programme; understanding its strategy; partner engagement and support; handpicking participants as stakeholders; evaluation and communication.
Since launching in 2008, Long said some 32 people have been trained as coaches and more than 100 partners and staff have received coaching.
“It’s a really exciting time for us in terms of turning coaching into a way of life. People are really passionate about it,” said Long. For example, one of the accountants said they didn’t “do emotions”, but by the third day of the programme, exclaimed: “Ooh, I think I just had an emotion!”
By 2010, more than 80 per cent of leaders had improved interpersonal skills, while 83 per cent had developed coaching attributes, according to an internal staff survey. Eighty per cent said the organisation cared about their development, 76 per cent that coaching has a direct beneficial business impact and 73 per cent an indirect impact.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 5