Survey: Are we ready for 2012?

Coaches and mentors must prove their worth as they face an uncertain year ahead. Coaching at Work’s readers’ survey shows they are well-prepared for the challenge

Responding to current challenges such as the economy and demonstrating ROI/value for money (VFM) are top of the agenda for the year ahead, according to this year’s Coaching at Work annual readers’ survey.

Some 49.2 per cent of respondents cited responding to challenges, including the economy, as the most or second-most important priority, including coaching clients to cope with uncertainty and through change, and making sure coaching is fit for purpose in the current climate (13.2 per cent).

Meanwhile, 27.7 per cent of you say evaluation/demonstrating ROI/ VFM is the number one/number two priority. It’s the third year running that this has been high on the agenda. Last year it was top priority, the year before it was at number two.

Tough times ahead

The emphasis is unsurprising given the current backdrop, with some economists predicting the UK is slipping into a double-dip recession, for example. Some of you fear tougher times ahead for coaching, and rising pressure to ensure coaching stays relevant and adapts to current needs.

At Coaching at Work’s recent conference on 23 November, panellist Aboodi Shabi said: “We stand on the brink of a future we cannot know, and we do not know what to do. We need to be able to help people answer those questions. We’re performing harder and harder, and to what end? There are things bubbling all over the world. I see something that says game over. We have a real crisis to face and young people are facing a future where they are less well-off than their parents. Coaches have the ability to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, so we can help people ask these questions.”

Mentors can respond to the current climate too. At the conference, panellist Jennifer Liston-Smith said: “The current crisis is a crisis in leadership. We need upward mentoring from junior people about flexible working and better ways of managing.”

One of the conference delegates, Leni Wildflower, said to the panel: “There is a tension inherent. There is not one person who could pay you 10 cents for coaching from the movement [Occupy] outside St Paul’s…a huge discrepancy between the rich and those not working. In the next year, the whole thing will be a world crisis. What would it be like to earn half the money we are earning because people won’t have the money to pay? How have coaches thought about this?”

Make the change

Liston-Smith said: “One of the things we can do is work where the change is taking place, for example, some of the leading investment banks – Citigroup’s diversity programme – because when all this shakes out we are still going to need women in positions of leadership. What if we had a slightly more diverse leadership? Would the same thing have happened if it had been 
Lehman Sisters? Be part of making the change happen, even if you are not saving the world. There’s still money in that sector.”

Interestingly, collaboration including between professional bodies was only mentioned by a small number of respondents to the survey (3.6 per cent), compared with 17 per cent last year. This could be because there are a growing number of collaborative initiatives.

Standards/professionalism/accreditation were top or second to top of the agenda for 19.2 per cent of you, while team coaching was a number one or two priority for 13.2 per cent of you, presumably for some at least as a way to add income.

Alison Carter, principal research fellow and consultant, Institute for Employment Studies, said: “Team coaching is not just the application of individual coaching to a larger collection of people belonging to the same part of the organisation, but a separate craft that draws not only on the field of coaching, but also the much older tradition of organisation development (OD), including process consultancy.

“The harsh economic conditions in many Western countries have led organisations to look for new ways to engage their teams and maximise the efficiency of their employees in order to remain ahead of their competitors. Team coaching is likely to increase further in popularity and so push coaching practice over the boundary line with OD consultancy. This has serious implications for aspects such as coach skills and supervision.”

Creating wider reach for coaching – related in some cases to how we respond to current challenges – is deemed to be important by 7 per cent of you. This included for a number of you spreading it in education: “helping children to understand coaching and use it as a life skill from a young age” and the voluntary sector.

Mentoring youths – disadvantaged and/or entrepreneurial – was mentioned by a number of you as a priority. For one, it was about “encouraging mid-20s/early-30s to volunteer their mentoring services to young unemployed who feel abandoned by society and unable to find work.”

Enhancing resilience

The survey included a question on how to enhance clients’ resilience (see table: What can we do to enhance resilience in our clients). This came into many of your answers on responding to current challenges. And health/wellbeing/stress management was a first or second priority for 10.8 per cent of you: “A byproduct of the current crisis has been that many of my clients are already aware of their own resilience [levels]. They have been taken over the threshold and are now simply looking for new ways of handling a prolonged period of uncertainty.

“Role modelling self-care is a recurring theme in my coaching and we often spend time exploring a slower pace to reflect the energy of major transition that is pervading. For many clients this is in fact a welcome shift, and discussions about work-life balance have become more integrated and real rather than the, sometimes, perfunctory discussions of old…

“This seems to be being generated by a need to keep in balance as clients are experiencing working harder now than ever, so down time is relished and part of shared conversations,” said Deborah Price, president of the UK International Coach Federation.

“Resilience to me is closely bonded to the relationship between what we notice and experience, and the story we create to explain it. In that mind-frame, we can help them be secure in understanding who they are, what they do well, what they are here to do, the values they can rely on, finding a bigger vision/something beyond self to contribute to and recognise and build the network of people around them who believe in and support them,” said Neil Scotton, co-founder of the One Leadership Project.

Your priorities for 2012

FOR COACHING	Top priority	Second priority	Total citing this
Responding to economic challenges (eg, helping clients work through change)	38.4	10.8	49.2
Evaluation/ROI/value for money	14.4	13.2	27.7
Standards and professionalism	9.6	9.6	19.2
Team coaching	9.6	3.6	13.2
Health/wellbeing coaching	6	4.8	10.8
Supervision	3.6	6	9.6
Widening its reach	6	1	7
Focusing on line managers and leaders	4.8
Careers coaching	3.6
More collaboration between professional bodies		3.6
More creative thinking		3.6
FOR MENTORING	Top priority	Second priority	Total citing this
Talent management	18.9	18.9
Responding to economic climate/ helping people work with change	15.5	15.5
Working with youths	6.8	6.8
Differentiating from coaching	3.4	3.4
Moving closer to coaching	3.4	3.4

Is coaching changing? (%)

• Yes: 50.6
• No: 30.1
• Don’t know: 19.3

HOW?

• More aligned with business needs 68.4
• More as part of other initiatives 49.1
• More brief coaching 24.6
• Moving towards consultancy 17.5
• More requiring the coach to be an expert in the client’s field 15.8
• More directive 14
• Moving towards mentoring 12.3
• Moving towards therapy 8.8

OTHER RESPONSES

• More integrated, blended approach
• Linked more closely to identifiable business benefit
• More building of internal coaching expertise
• More coaches looking to differentiate their ‘brand’ by calling themselves somatic coach, or mindfulness coach, which Joe Public won’t get their head around
• More relational
• More coaching for retention, less coaching for remedial reasons
• More based on psychological concepts
• Delivered more professionally
• Resilience

What can we do to enhance resilience in our clients?

WHAT YOU SAY:

• Develop and care for ourselves “Focus on coaching the unconscious mind rather than goals and actions, using a mindfulness approach of living in the present, to support clients who are not able to change their external circumstances”
• Role model resilience strategies/self-care “Support them to maintain balance, good practices and a sense of perspective”
• Help them build self-belief “Deepen their thinking and heighten their ability to work with their emotions”
• Help them realise that they have choice “Help them see where they have been resilient in the past… then build on that”
• Help them increase their self-awareness “Show them tools they can practically apply, help them to understand how their brains work and help them to discover their default reactions and practical tools on how to interrupt these patterns”
• Hold up a mirror to them “Encourage them to look at their life holistically, and listen to their own needs, not just the needs of the organisation”
• Champion them “Bring them into relationship with who they really are – not who they think they ought to be”
• Challenge them “Help them understand the nature of resilience”
• Celebrate them “Deal with reality, not past expectations”
• Help them develop effective self-coaching strategies “Work with them diligently and patiently – don’t look for dramatic short-term changes but incremental and sustainable shifts”
• Encourage them to take on less

Words of caution

• Keep away from patronising them with advice
• Avoid being confluent with the ways in which leaders have behaved
• Know our limits
• I don’t like the word ‘resilience’ as for me it means something hard and unbending. I prefer flexibility and positive attitude
• This presupposes that this is our responsibility?
• I think we need to be really careful in what we mean by ‘resilience’ – are we merely encouraging burnout or supporting unsustainable levels of change? Real resilience is about helping individuals and organisations identify and align to their values, take a big picture perspective and recognise their own boundaries in order to make grounded and healthy decisions
• We should not be enhancing resilience

Approaches we used

• Cognitive Behavioural Coaching
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Seligman’s Positive Psychology/Strengths
• Frank Farelly’s work on Provocation Therapy
• Carol Kauffman’s ‘Four Steps to Confidence’ tool
• Mindfulness
• Stress-awareness/management
• Emotional Intelligence

Team coaching is likely to increase further in popularity and so push coaching practice over the boundary line with OD consultancy

What would it be like to earn half the money we are earning because people won’t have the money to pay? How have coaches thought about this?

Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1