Coaching in Russia is at a much younger stage of development than in the UK. It lacks focus and regulation, and is poorly understood. Yet, coaching is beginning to find its place in the Russian business psyche, reports Lena Smirnova
Business coaching classes may not require students to swallow pills, don ear muffs and wriggle into straightjackets, but for some Russian business people it’s a novel practice akin to a psychological experiment. And it’s one they’re often reluctant to take part in.
In the 15 years or so that business coaching has been available in Russia, established psychotherapists and psychologists have made up a good proportion of those studying and practising it.
Today, more of the coaches are simply specialist professionals or consultants and human resources managers who have joined the field. Nevertheless, the earlier stereotype persists.
Another problem is that coaching is lightly regulated in Russia and coaching services are often poorly marketed, and of variable quality.
Myles Downey, one of Europe’s most prominent business coaches and founder of the London-based School of Coaching, travelled to Russia in early November to participate in several seminars and conferences.
Speaking later to Coaching at Work, he said the business coaching market in Russia is still unfocused: “There are too many unprepared coaches without fundamental skills.”
Corporate clients, as a result, “are trying to control the situation as much as they can – turning coaching into a standardised product and reducing its cost”.
On a positive note, he stressed that there are various associations and federations of coaches looking to set up common standards, including the Professional Association of Russian-Speaking Coaches (PARC), who are working with international coaching associations to achieve this goal.
Downey insists, though, that companies in Russia are becoming more interested in using business coaches to make their management more effective. “Coaching is obviously at a different stage of development here than in the UK,” he said.
Major obstacles
But he was optimistic, too. As in the early days of the profession in the UK, leading coaching figures in Russia were coming together to found a profession based on good standards: “It was like looking at the past because all the strengths and instruments that came together and created the profession and market [in the UK] are now in operation in Moscow.”
The major obstacles hindering the growth of Russian coaching are cost, a lack of information about what coaching entails, a shortage of coaches – and muddled standards.
Many Russian companies are unsure of the benefits they will receive for such a hefty price tag – and are unwilling to take the risk to find out.
“They have heard talk of this somewhere, but don’t know what it is,” said Yekaterina Polonskaya, business coach at the Moscow branch of the Italian Forma Futuro coaching and consulting company. “They don’t really understand why someone should pay for this.”
The first professional coaching programme in Russia was launched in 1998 by the Moscow-based Support Centre for Corporate Governance and Business. Since then, despite ongoing problems with the profession in Russia, demand for business coaches has been growing, especially among international companies there.
Indeed, two-thirds of the companies that use Forma Futuro’s coaching services are based in Europe outside Russia or in north America, Polonskaya told Coaching at Work. Similarly,
80 per cent of the clients at the Moscow-based European Business Coaching Center have European or north American owners or are multinationals, said Natalia Dolina, the centre’s general director and president of Russia’s representative office at the International Coach Federation.
Part of this is about cost. Business coaching fees for a quality service are high in Russia (coaching sessions cost on average US$33 per hour or US$475 per week), so the sessions are usually regarded as a VIP-level service.
As a result, when coaching is purchased, it is usually for top and middle managers. Coaching for lower level managers and workers, when it is bought at all, is usually for short programmes that are cosmetic in effect. The results are correspondingly superficial, said Andrey Korolikhin, director of the Russian School of Coaching and head of PARC.
Meanwhile, even this slow increase in demand is outpacing the supply of decent coaches
to the Russian market. Russia has about 100 times fewer business coaches than the US, according to Leader 3000, a Moscow-based centre for coaching development.
Pseudo-coaching
Some newly qualified Russian coaches lack business experience, while others actually have no intention of becoming coaches, Korolikhin said. They simply become qualified as coaches to make themselves more attractive to manager recruiters.
“There are a lot of ‘freshly cooked’ coaches on the market who do not have experience of working in an organisational context,” Korolikhin said. “If they still manage to sell their services, they are practically training on the clients.”
Some coaching companies are seeking to tap into the market through sales and marketing, rather than quality coaching.
“Pseudo-coaches are ready to fulfil almost any customer’s whim without thinking about the long-term effects of such a strategy on the market or their professional career,” Korolikhin said.
Part of the problem is the client – who buys into the concept of coaching without really understanding what it’s all about: “In-demand professional coaches feel great pressure from the corporate market to lower their prices or serve corporate fantasies about business coaching that have nothing to do with it,” he warned.
His Russian School of Coaching, ‘East-West’, is trying to plug this gap in the demand for effective Russian coaches, offering a
three-tier course with ‘practical’, ‘specialist’ and ‘professional’ training modules.
The course offers a “complete theoretical and practical background to be able to deliver high-level coaching and spread good coaching skills among your clients and colleagues as well as provide supervision and become a mentor for your less experienced colleagues,” says the school’s documentation.
Professional compass
Meanwhile, one issue all Russian coaches have is that in the classical coaching approach it is assumed that clients already know the solutions to their problems, so the coach’s task is to ask questions that help them find the right answers.
In Russia, however, coaching tends to take a semi-consultative form, in which it is more
common for the coach to give active guidance to clients, Polonskaya said.
“Our country is still a country of advice. The coach not only asks questions, but is also expected to tell the client something and share his advice,” she noted.
Korolikhin said that Russia’s professional coaching communities and associations are trying to form some harmonised standards from these different approaches, creating a “professional compass” for Russian coaches.
Coaching services and their clients are also starting to pay more attention to their coaches’ association memberships in such organisations, rather than just their formal certificates of qualification.
Some Russian coaching services train their own coaches. The European Business Coaching Center picks coaches passing through its own educational programmes and provides continuing training, Dolina said.
Quality management
Meanwhile, looking across the country, the quality of Russian coaching is far from uniform. While coaches in major Russian cities may have access to such training, the situation is much bleaker in the regions.
Business coaching services are most developed in Moscow, St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. There are coaches in all other large cities as well, but the options for business customers are slim and quality is not guaranteed. Corporate coaching in its international form is poorly developed in the regions, Dolina said.
Yelena Belugina, managing partner of coach management and general director of Coaching Technologies in Rostov-on-Don (http://coach-management.ru), noted that there has been a surge in demand for education in corporate management in the south of Russia.
She expects that the coaching market will continue to expand in Russia’s regions. As it develops, clients should become more selective when choosing coaching programmes, picking sessions that focus on specific skill sets, and driving quality upwards.
As this process of improvement continues – in major urban areas as well – Korolikhin predicted that pseudo-coaches will be squeezed from the market. There will be fewer corporate victims of mislabelled coaching services and the criteria for selecting coaches will be clearer, he said.
Growing demand
And there is plenty of room for growth. Korolikhin estimated that 70 per cent of Russian coaching’s potential business clients have not yet tried coaching. About
20 per cent have and will continue to use the services of business coaches in the future, while
10 per cent have already lost interest after negative experiences with pseudo-coaches.
Korolikhin added that the market share of in-house coaches within organisations is likely
to increase.
Meanwhile, the profession will become more Russian – the pool of expat coaches that target foreign managers will become more diluted by local coaches with a good grasp of foreign languages and experience of working in transnational corporations.
Dolina agreed that the demand for Russian coaching will continue to grow. “More people and companies see the point in this and the monetisation of the results,” she said. “The market demands high-quality and easily understandable services [and] demand will continue to grow concerning the quality of the educational programmes for coaching, coaches and the process itself.”
Coaching at Work, volume 8, issue 2