The Right Coach: Howard Morgan, Phil Harkins and Marshall Goldsmith

Executive coaching is a precision tool for optimising the abilities of leaders.  Most often, coaching focuses on the leader’s individual effectiveness.  In other cases, the coaching aims more at the leader’s effectiveness within a team environment or at this or her capabilities to drive organisational change.  Regardless of where coaching aims on the leadership spectrum, the executive coach works in close, trusted partnership with the leader.  The coach applies experience, know-how, and insight to key areas, and judiciously pushes the client beyond his or her comfort zone to reach levels of performance greater than the client would have achieved alone – all within an accelerated time frame.

Coaching is not just for problems anymore.  Ten years ago, coaching primarily concentrated on people with performance issues.  A coach came on board because a leader’s personal style had a negative impact on peers and reports, or because his or her skill set was inadequate – conditions that were leading to derailment.  Today the impression has turned 180 degrees.  As the marketplace has become increasingly competitive and fast-moving, organisations now realise they must work with speed and precision to enable key people to achieve critical business objectives.  In response, coaching has embraced a whole new focus: how to take good people and make them the best they can be, positioning them to work more effectively and cohesively in their environments, and making the most of their capabilities.  In other words, coaching is now most often applied to top performers whose leadership and growth potential are highly valued by the organisation.

To define what coaching is, let’s examine what it isn’t.  Coaching often differs, for example, from consulting.  As outsiders, neither coach nor consultant is likely to understand the client’s business environment as well as the client does.  Both coach and consultant rely on data gathering to interpret the organisation’s or individual’s challenges.  However, although the consultant uses that data to prepare a path for others to follow, the coach uses it to build the critical capabilities of key people so that they themselves can forge their own paths.  Unlike the consultant, the coach works in partnership with the client to discover solutions together, finding them through careful listening, provocative questioning, enlightened guidance, and the right level of prompting at the right time.  To a great degree, the coach’s goal is to enable the client to find the right answers by him- or herself.

Although coaching may sometimes feel like something halfway between the couch and the confessional, coaching is not therapy.  The orientation is very different.  The coach may use some of the listening and analytical tools of therapy to build connection, trust, and openness.  But although personal issues or deeper problems are likely to arise in the course of working together, the coach is not meant, and is usually not qualified, to provide more than supportive, confidential advice in those matters.  A coach will maintain the focus of the engagement on moving the client forward, in line with business objectives.  The coach is not a substitute colleague or fellow executive.  Many coaches have been successful in business in earlier incarnations.  This provides a sense of comfort and familiarity in the client’s world, allowing him or her to communicate in the same language.  It also provides key insights into the complex and competing pressures of the client’s work environment.  The coach’s stay in the organisation is meant to be short.  A best practice coach, by design and ethic, is not in the business of creating a dependent relationship.

Thanks to Simon Whitehouse for finding this article! Kate Peacock