Two years ago, Lawrence Parsons picked up the coaching baton at professional services firm, Grant Thornton. The coaching extends to all 4,500 staff. It’s a challenge he relishes. Liz Hall reports
Lawrence Parsons, head of leadership development and coaching at Grant Thornton UK LLP, is looking out over his garden as we speak – it’s a place where he enjoys being creative, along with in the kitchen, cooking. But he relishes the pace and challenge of his day job, too.
Parsons joined Grant Thornton eight years ago, moving into his current role two years ago. A fine arts graduate, he’d originally planned to teach fine arts. “Instead I discovered professional services and accountancy, although I’m not a qualified accountant.
“I still like to think I have creativity, which I express in the kitchen and garden, but I adore working with really smart entrepreneurial, dynamic people; who are the kind of people willing to challenge what you say but do so with the right intent. Both are important at Grant Thornton.
“During Covid, for example, the organisation didn’t furlough people – we believed the intent behind this aid was not for businesses like ours so we made a decision not to draw on government aid. That’s one of the things I like about Grant Thornton – people will think beyond the commercial.”
Currently, he’s “enjoying the privilege of working from home. I’m a dad – I have two sons, 10 and 15, so a good chunk of my time is spent helping them with whatever is preoccupying them, such as helping my eldest apply for a summer job.”
In his role, in addition to leadership development and coaching, Parsons looks after training Grant Thornton’s people managers and clients, and performance management. In previous leadership development roles in other companies, he also looked after coaching.
His interest in coaching was fuelled partly by completing a diploma in counselling, and by conversations with psychotherapist friends. Although he participated in his first coaching workshop 15 years ago, he only qualified four years ago, as is often the case with HR practitioners bringing coaching into their day jobs. But as Grant Thornton is a professional services firm, “professional standards matter” so it was important for him to be accredited.
These days, he coaches and supervises internally, but has to ensure this isn’t at the expense of ensuring “the whole system is healthy”.
Grant Thornton’s journey into coaching has been a long one, too.
“It predates me. I think of myself as a member of a relay team and I’ve picked up the baton. Grant Thornton first introduced coaching a decade or so ago. Sacha Romanovitch, our former CEO, in her previous role as head of people and culture, was a true advocate of coaching and she saw it as an instrument of change, as a way of leadership.
“As a tool and methodology it’s been through a series of evolutions, from introducing it for leaders, professionalising it so it’s accredited by the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC) and training up coaches and supervisors. It’s now time to invigorate coaching so it’s re-aligned more to strategy.”
Additionally, Grant Thornton coaches clients and coaches on Cranfield School of Management’s MBA. This external coaching work is looked after by Sam Isaacson.
“Coaching is part of our DNA. We work to the highest standards and it’s part of my role to be the custodian of these standards.
“We’ve also reached a point in our culture where we have a number of partners who are coaching. Our head of people and culture, Perry Burton, is currently studying a coaching MSc at Henley Business School, which shows how seriously we take coaching. Coaching is progressing the people agenda in Grant Thornton.”
Inclusion
Grant Thornton has an impressive track record when it comes to inclusion.
“David Dunckley, our CEO, has made it really clear that he wants the firm to become a more inclusive place. We have a number of internal development programmes for people who might otherwise be excluded through barriers encountered by females or ethnic minorities.”
Coaching and mentoring is available to all its UK employees – some 4,500.
“It’s not just for the chosen elite. Anyone can send me an email and I’ll listen to their requirements and, nine times out of ten, we will find them a coach or mentor. This means we could have people joining straight from school and at any point in their career, accessing coaching or mentoring.
“Added to that, there are certain groups we know we need to target so they give a return to the firm. And we have a corporate responsibility to ensure under-represented groups get extra support. Through coaching and mentoring, we offer support to remove barriers.”
Specific groups aided include employees from the support functions, ethnic minorities and female senior managers.
Reverse mentoring, where a senior leader in the firm is mentored by a more junior individual on different aspects of inclusion and their own experiences, also plays a part in Grant Thornton’s diversity and inclusion efforts. At the recent EMCC global conference in May, Parsons joined a panel with British Transport Police, and decided that rather than taking up all the air space, he’d invite a mentor and mentee to share their story.
Mentee James Brown and his reverse mentor Morium Akter, described the special relationship they’ve formed, despite having both felt nervous at the outset. Akter said it was important to “be transparent, not being worried about offending each other”, and that the experience has helped her confidence. Brown said, “I see society as more divided than ever before” and underlined the importance of “not being aggressive on either side”, instead “just listening to people and taking on the other person’s point of view”.
Another example of inclusion is Grant Thornton being the first professional services firm to open up opportunities by removing academic entry requirements for new school leaver and graduate hires.
Coaching support is also offered to anyone returning from long-term absence such as for illness, a sabbatical or having children.
“We recognise that it takes time to come back to the workplace; things have changed. We want to encourage people to have a great experience and the headspace to adjust back into work.”
Its programme for female managers has action learning sets hosted and facilitated by Grant Thornton’s internal coaches.
“This isn’t purely coaching but we’ve found that where we’ve involved coaches, action learning sets become self-sufficient more quickly.”
Coaching is also woven into all of Grant Thornton’s leadership development and people management programmes. Coaching skills is included in its people manager training, which is available to around 1,000 employees.
“Coaching’s not just for qualified coaches. I think of it as ‘pay-as-you-go’. Someone could say they want to become fully qualified or they may just need everyday coaching skills.”
Grant Thornton’s internal coach training scheme is accredited by the EMCC. It’s designed as a one-year programme, but employees can take longer.
Any of its employees who are actively coaching clients or colleagues must be fully trained and supervised. The firm currently has around 80 or so Job Plus coaches (employees who coach in addition to their ‘day job’), and has trained 11 internal supervisors.
To what extent are these initiatives Parsons’ ideas? “Collaboration is a great quality and I see my job partly as listening.”
The returner inclusion work came about, for example, through listening to the head of inclusion, diversity and wellbeing, Jenn Barnett, who “highlighted this as a group she wanted to better support and I just put that into practice about 18 months ago.”
Another group offered coaching is high-potential assistant managers and managers.
“We don’t want people to feel we’re skimping on coaching resources and only offering it to specific groups and leaving others behind. We’re supporting high-potential staff to help them fast-track their career. So there’s a balance here, coaching for everyone that helps to remove barriers and invest in our future.
“We’re looking for the groups that would really benefit and how we identify them. Again, it’s about inclusion and under-representation, and high potential.”
As for return on investment, he says:
“We all know the link between coaching and corporate results is difficult to measure and it’s difficult to attribute solely to coaching. But I can tell you that I hear stories from people where coaching has fast-tracked their careers, helped them to think more clearly and helped them to re-engage with the firm.
“For example, a director on track to become a partner, when they came back from having their second child, was under huge pressure and received coaching from one of our partner coaches. She says it gave her the headspace to find the right balance to re-engage with work.”
Grant Thornton is waiting to see the impact of coaching among assistant managers and managers.
Supervision
Parsons says he’s “very keen” on having regular check-ins with supervisors – he talks to them four times a year about the themes they’re noticing in the coaching.
And, he says, “the textbooks will tell you that internal supervisors won’t be challenging enough, but I can only tell you that ours are assertive about what they think the organisation needs to do to support coaches!”
One supervisor highlighted that some of the internal coaches qualified five or so years ago and hadn’t refreshed their CPD. So Grant Thornton put in place a mini CPD series, with speakers on topics such as inclusion.
Online offer
Grant Thornton moved much of its coaching online a few years ago, increasing access and agility and reducing its carbon footprint. The pandemic has seen it shift to online-only, with no negative impact on quality.
“We employ people from Aberdeen to Cornwall and traditionally we thought coaching had to be in person. But we realised three or four years ago that when you have employees spread geographically, only offering in-person coaching would reduce access.
“Additionally we’ve championed agile working for the last two to three years.
“So on 23 March [2020], when we were all told to work from home, it was relatively straightforward for us, it was only on a different scale. And now we’ve moved to completely online coaching.”
Grant Thornton’s coaching for Cranfield MBA students has been delivered entirely online over the last 15 months, too.
“We’ve kept the quality. You don’t have to travel to make things work.”
Parsons is very passionate about coaching in general, including for senior leaders. He recalls “about two jobs ago” how he’d organised a development event for the senior leadership team.
“And afterwards, I was chatting to a leader, who was a CEO in his own right, about how it went. It was really eye-opening in terms of the impact of coaching. For a whole hour or so, he talked to me about the difficulties he had with his team and the challenges he had with their diverse drivers.
“And I found myself thinking, there are so few individuals he could have this conversation with. I realised that simply listening was incredibly powerful.
“All I asked him was ‘who is the referee?’ That question was [powerful] … he was a bright, great leader, he knew what was needed, but who could he talk to?”