Coaching has become a fashionable profession.  More and more people are now considering normal the idea that a coach can effectively help them to move from a current situation to an expected outcome within their life and business.  This new trend has also inspired many people to call themselves coaches while they are not.  So if you are considering hiring a personal coach to help your self development you could use the following questions to assess his/her experience and credibility:

1. what coaching qualifications do you hold?
2. what can I achieve from being coached from you?
3. how can you advise me about my life?
4. on what areas can you coach me?
5. in what areas do you specialise?
6. how long have you been coaching for?
7. who are your clients at the moment?
8. what is your background before you started coaching?
9. do you offer packages or do you charge on a on going basis?

I will list below some acceptable answers you might get and that you can compare to your personal expectations:

1. “I hold and Intensive Coaching Training Certificate from Results Coaching System” or “I qualified as a coach from the Coaching Academy”: coaching is at the moment unregulated.  Anybody can start selling his/her time as a coach and unfortunately many people out there are currently doing it.  Having a qualification from a recognised training institution will guarantee you to be dealing with a real coach not just somebody who defines himself/herself a coach.
2. “Anything realistically achievable that you are willing to commit time and resources to” or “it will depend on what you would like to achieve”: coaching can help you to move from a current situation to an expected outcome.  In any case the coach cannot know before hand what you would like and can achieve from the coaching.  It should sound suspicious if he/she speculates on the expected outcome.
3. “As a coach I refrain from advising, I ask questions and help you to find your own answers”: coaching is about asking questions and not advising.  A coach that advises is not a coach but perhaps a mentor, consultant or trainer.
4. “As a personal coaching I can help most individuals in a broad number of areas, such as personal performance, improving social, romantic and business relationships, parenting, weight management, finance, housing, project management, personal achievement, midlife crisis and motivation: the question is what areas would you like to be coached on?”: different coaches will offer perhaps different answers.
5. “I work primarily with personal clients, private individuals, who are usual in management or professional roles that would like to achieve more from their life”: it’s preferable dealing with somebody that has clear idea of who his/her clients are and that chooses to work just with them rather than a person that works with anybody who comes along.
6. “Have been coaching for 3 years, full time for the last 18 months”: coaching is a relatively new profession and the top qualified coaches in the UK have been coaching for just a bit more that ten years.  Therefore 2-3 years experience is considered a good and reliable level of expertise.
7. “following our code of ethics I cannot disclose who my clients are: I occasionally mention situations and coaching conversations while I always keep my client’s identity confidential“  Beware of a coach who lists their clients’ names.
8. “I have 10 years experience in training and education” or “I have over 15 years of management experience in both junior, senior and board positions in small to large enterprises”: some coaches have a background in HR or psychology and build on that; at the same time coaching is a methodology to deal with issues that goes beyond the actual background so any solid work experience will be a great start for a professional willing to become a coach.
9. “I offer several packages like personal, business and executive based on 12 sessions developed over 3 to 6 months”: open ended payment schemes where you start one day without a clear idea of when you finish are reflecting the working methodology of therapists: they are also encouraging the coach to keep you engaged as long as possible in order to make more money off you.

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I was recently at an event where David Hyner, a well known and respected coach, was explaining his model for self coaching for which he defined the Massive Goal Principle.   David has interviewed in his life a number of top achievers from all walks of life and he derived from them this methodology.

Within an hour of intense and interesting explanation he highlighted a well organized technique that involved a pyramidal structure of concepts and metrics about planning and execution for the achievement of your own big goal.

While I was fascinated by the good structure and the level of charisma that David managed to establish in a venue filled with nearly 50 business people I started thinking about a few simple concepts, mostly biased by my experience and training:

• Given a large number of people, for each great achiever in that group there are hundreds or thousand that in spite of motivation, inspiration, luck and a number of other factors did not achieve what they planned.  Dan Brown had one of the characters of his novel “The Da Vinci Code” stating that: “history is written by winners”: by the same metric I would say that great achievers are well known or become famous but who tried equally hard with poorer results won’t be mentioned too much.
• If we look around we’ll notice that many people are not trying to achieve anything great and they are happy to “survive”: having a relatively easy life, a job to pay bills, never challenging themselves and drift along.
• Most people fail at achieving something because of a number of factors and accountability to themselves and motivation tend to be low or inexistent, even when the initial purpose was good.

In business as well as in life people tend to think in terms of goals: what to do (I want to run a marathon), learn (I want a degree or a new qualification), achieve (I want to raise my turnover by 30% or having a £100K job) and so on.  In reality how many times did you hear somebody saying that she will start dieting, exercising or wasting less time on meaning less tasks at work and so on and so on?

I have even encountered last year an online product that offers, for a fee, a structured coaching program that supposedly helps a pair of friend to set up a mutual coaching programme, establishing goals for each other and coaching each other toward their achievement.  The only experience I have is of two friends of mine who decided to try this and within a few weeks their goals, although if reasonably well defined collapsed for lack of consistency from both parts: committing to a close friend was not felt strong enough and the so-called coaching sections were merely friendly chats without a structure and a time frame.

Self coaching, following a personal commitment or written instructions from a book or online, fails because of the lack of two main factors:

1. accountability: we tend to promise to ourselves, often in good faith, that we’ll do this and the other.  Many people tend to over commit themselves about their “to do” list: frequently this can cause stress, anxiety or apathy toward the particular task.  Ultimately these are just promises we do to ourselves.  Let’s see 2 examples:
   1. I tell to myself that I will get up at 7AM and go for a run.  I can be the kind of person who does it or, as it can happen, when the alarm clock goes off I might simply ignore it.
   2. I agree with my friend Mark to meet at 7 and go for a run: it becomes an appointment with somebody else and makes me accountable toward him; as I do not want to let Mark down and I will be there at 7.
2. clarity of distance: when I am involved in a decision about myself it is usually difficult to be objective about the direction to take: think at examples like changing job, deciding upon an important purchase or committing on a business strategy.  An external, detached, person can often see very objectively your situation and come out with a decision that, perhaps, you would not like and take that easily.  The clarity of distance is natural if you are completely extraneous to a person rather than a friend or a relative.  In fact who knows you very well and has exposure to a historical knowledge of what brought you to the decision, might be as biased as you are about it.

The above reasons are offering the perfect case for using a professional coach to help one’s decision process: the coach has (really, should have) qualification and experience to help your decision process and help you to:

• commit yourself to challenging, realistic and measurable goals
• ensure that you are accountable toward yourself and the coach
• when you stuck in an important decision the coach will have the clarity of distance to facilitate your decision by helping your thinking process

Professional Coaching offers structured and time framed sessions that, like short business meetings, are designed to take decision and plan actions.  Coaching is based on questions, powerful questions that help you deciding and committing on what to do: whether you are ponderating the options about the next acquisition for your company, how to plan for a new start-up or what to do next in your career a coach can ensure your thinking process is always at its best.

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In my corporate experience to date I have encountered a number of realities that range from the fun place to work to companies that follow policies based on fear.  To the former group belong companies where people are more than happy to work, often very hard, for the pleasure of sharing their experience with many other talented individuals while being part of interesting projects.  The latter tend to be organizations with high turnover of people and where the only incentives for them to stick around are the financial rewards they are getting and eventually the experience that can be sold to other companies at a later stage.

Control and command management style

The typical management structure based on control and command was first established when, in conjunction with the industrial revolution companies started to grow larger and larger.  The already existing agricultural model never needed to grow big and complicated enough to require articulated management structures: now industrial manufacturing, procurement, sales, stock management and various other functions needed a way to be pulled together.  Armies had at the time the only organizational models available, with multi level management system so similar structures and bureaucracies were implemented.

Control and command vs. coaching

Let’s consider two very different models of managing and getting results out of people:

• Think first about a sergeant yelling orders to a soldier who answers “sir, yes sir”: this represents a model that has been used for thousands of years in armies around the world and ensures standard performance among all people in a unit.  Soldiers are there to follow orders, without asking questions and without necessarily agreeing on the specific tasks they are carrying out.
• At the same time let look at a football or basketball coach during training and during a game.  The coach is there to manage his team.  There is no doubt about who is in charge: at the same time she is there to inspire and motivate athletes for them to achieve increasingly better performance.

With over 70% of workers in USA being employed in a so called knowledge work and a similar percentage in the UK I am here considering why and how control and command is still, today, the most used management style.  Often because who is managing doesn’t know an alternative way on inspiring and motivating her reports and ensuring they always perform to their best.  The simplest solution works out to tell others what they would do if they were you.

A coaching approach to management: quiet leadership

The concept of Quiet Leadership introduced by David Rock in his book with the same title, suggests that in an environment where most people are paid to think a coaching approach nurtures this concept and effectively inspire people to do exactly that.  When you are employing a broad range of top graduates, scientists, MBA and PhD you are aware of being surrounded by very clever people: these are people that can easily be inspired to think creatively toward their own solutions to their problems.  So the Quiet Leader is not a person ordering and commanding instructions to his reports but she enters short and powerful coaching conversation where she asks questions and manages to get the other person actively involved in the dialog in order to achieve her own conclusions.  This result is usually a guaranteed success because of the following reasons:

• If you were encouraged to think through a problem and you achieved your own solution you will own it to the point that you will have a much higher motivation to perform and deliver the result.  To the contrary receiving a suggestion or an order about what to do is somehow easier but you will perform or execute a task as your boss suggested it.
• The coaching conversation is usually geared around the process rather than the content: that allows the manager to stay out of details and avoid the possible temptations of micromanaging her staff.
• The process of encouraging you to think through the various possibilities will also foster a more independent thinking mind that will naturally seek solutions rather that simply asking: “what shall I do next?”.

Benefits of coaching approach to management

A statistic available from the International Coaching Federation, reports the following benefits for companies where a coaching model as been adopted:

• Lower stress levels 57%
• Self-confidence 52%
• Setting better goals 62%
• Increased self-awareness 67%
• Self-discovery 53%
• More balanced life 60%

Conclusions

There are a number of jobs and activities that require a structured and sometimes strictly organized management system, e.g. in manufacturing or in building sites: the coaching approach, on the other hand can be (and is) successfully applied to situations where people are primarily paid to think, such as in designing or other creative jobs, finance, general management and it is great to address conflict resolution.

In the medium and long term an established coaching culture will help your company to function better as a whole, improving key people retention, ensuring they are happy and motivated to work hard for the ultimate success of their employer.

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In sport having a coach is fact given for granted in order to guarantee performance, focussed effort, attention to details and continuous stretching of your personal motivation to succeed.  Many of the top performers in the show business or in politics are using more or less regularly the expertise of a professional personal coach.  A growing number of large companies and organizations are instilling a coaching culture as a definitive turn from the classic regimented management style based on control and command.

A survey, run by the International Coaching Federation, has revealed a number of highly positive results out of a sample of over 200 business owners, professionals and managers that used coaching.  The main role of the coach was: 84.8 % sounding board, 78.1% motivator, 56.7% friend and 50.5% mentor.  Among the outcomes of coaching we can see:  67.6% higher level of self-awareness, 62.4% smarter goal-setting, 60.5% more balanced life and 57.1% lower stress levels.  The typical issues addressed by the coach we can list: 84.5 % time management, 74.3% career guidance, 73.8% business advice and 58.6% relationship / family issues.

In business people have historically used various sources of education and personal skill to fill the gap between what is expected from their employer or clients and what their natural performance is.  There are obviously many multi skilled people that can plan, organize, manage, sell, invoice, recover credits and grow their business all alone.

As their business grows also the need for more and more specialized skill increases and the single business owner or the partners involved in the business tend to run out of their personal skills. From time to time we all acknowledge the need of a:

• Solicitor to prepare and check business contracts or to manage some unfortunate litigations with clients and supplier
• Accountant to prepare the company accounts and tax return
• HR expert for employment matters
• Marketing expert for PR, adverts, promotion
• Computer support to guarantee an efficient and smooth running of our computer systems

The list can be a lot longer depending on the circumstances: it is accepted and common understanding that for a large number of specialized services you will ask for the expertise of a person or company that offers and guarantees success in a particular area.

At the same time when it’s about personal performance, organization, time management, motivation and people management there is a general assumption that these skills can be learnt in the field, with little or no formal preparation or training. A professional executive coach can help you focussing on the two or perhaps three areas you would like to boost or improve in your current job and support you to achieve excellence.

So as a conclusion to this post I would suggest the following.  If we are asking “who needs a coach?” the answer could be: “most people that want to excel in what they are doing”.

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I was recently at a talk organized by Cambridge Network where Louise Makin was presenting her 4 years at BTG and the great transformation she managed to undertake in this company.  The first part of the presentation was factual: the company was financially in a very bad shape when she was first offered the position of CEO and she managed to lead a deep transformation in the culture and running of the company itself. A heterogeneous group of different business models and modus operandi that was carrying over £30M of losses in 2004 became a successful money making organization in 2008 when the company managed to acquire Protherics and it is now in a very strong position with £60M in the bank.  While the presentation continued into the more human aspects of running the company Ms Makin explained the continuous difficulty of running a public company where every decision has to be communicated to the market that ultimately will take decisions about buying or selling shares in the company.  She also made a great analogy in choosing the right team between the day to day running of a company with the aim to succeed and being part of an endurance sailing and running race.

She described how at the beginning decisions were tough:  redundancies were unavoidable and causing low morale. As the strategic plan proceeded it was obvious that the strong management team she put together had the right attitude and determination to succeed.  I found interesting her definition for these people is of being great givers: people that were and are truly interested in giving to the company energy, skills and full dedication without necessarily measuring their personal return.

Several times she mentioned her loneliness in running a large organization and the difficulty of sharing her doubts and insights in an environment where uncertainty can surely cause panic and instability to the market.

In my experience, once you make it to the top of an organization, you tend to share similar feelings and experiences, a great analogy to when you climb a mountain on your own.  You get to the top and, as you look around, you realise you are alone.  Many people, particularly those that report directly to you tend to assume you have something extra and they expect that extra from you, all the time.  You do not or cannot share with them your doubts and uncertainties and the pressure on you keeps growing.

In a situation like the one described above an Executive Coach can help a CEO or a top executive in their decision process, acting as a sounding board, a trusted person that can truly facilitate the decision process of the executive being coached while maintaining total confidentiality.  The main task for the coach is to ask questions, powerful open ended questions, without offering any input, suggestion or advice.  Coaching can make a big difference in the way you as the executive are running your business: best results are achieved when the coach manages to stay out of the content, that is the day to day drama, the decisions, the workload and source of stress and concentrates on the process, the coaching process of getting you toward your business goals.

Does it sound too abstract? Try it to believe it.

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