Good business coaching is so powerful that if it were a drug, it would be illegal. A client walks into a coaching session stressed, overburdened, ready to give up – and an hour later emerges transformed: clear, focused, calmer, fit again to fight and win.
Coaching this good looks like magic – but it’s actually about consistent and disciplined application of the right tools at the right time. This book is about how to become that almost-magician, whether as part of your ‘day job’ or as an external coach. It is the serious introduction to the field – ‘serious’ because it is for people already living in the complexities of business or organisational life, and ‘introduction’ because it gives you a thorough, well-grounded knowledge of the basics and how to do them well, then a ‘map of the territory’ of all the rest.
First, though, this chapter gives you an overview. It describes what’s driving the market, where people use coaching – and when they shouldn’t. Then Chapter 2 describes the plethora of ways of earning a living with it. Or you might like to hop straight to Chapter 3, ‘Do you have what it takes?’. Or even plunge right into Chapter 4, ‘Developing your coaching: first steps’.
In 2003, The Economist magazine estimated the coaching market was worth $1 billion worldwide, and in the fast-growth stage of doubling within 24 months.1 They were right. Less than two decades on, coaching in organisations has grown to the point where a 2019 Harvard Business Review article says it is a skill all leaders and managers must now have.2
Think, for a start, of the change in just one generation. My mother didn’t need a coach. She lived in the same house from marriage to death, had a single clear role, which she filled capably and confidently, and a strong, unchanging network of lifelong friends and neighbours. News arrived via a solitary daily paper and the radio; over half her life was lived before there was a television in the house. I, on the other hand, am now on my third career, plus hiccups and byways en route. I have travelled on business to over 40 countries (flights; delays; brief fascinating glimpses of new places), lived in several of them, remarried and, along with time zones, languages, retrainings, new colleagues, new tasks, have always had multiple roles – team member, boss, subordinate, leader, finding something to thaw for dinner. My world is bursting with emails, meetings, phones, tasks, travel, the news, the bustle. It’s exhausting but it’s fun and stimulating.
That level of stimulation is the point. Compared with only one generation ago, the level of cognitive load (i.e. the amount of incoming data we have to process) has multiplied hugely. But my brain hasn’t, so coaching is, for me and many others, the equivalent of plugging in some extra processing capacity. With a great coach, it’s like plugging into the National Grid – a surge of energy and clear focus that recharges the batteries and hauls me back up to peak form.
At the systemic level, there are many other drivers, some of them cumulative over more than one generation. They include:
Is this just whining? As Alex Linley points out,5 the last 50 years have been, before COVID-19, the most blessed that humankind has ever experienced in the whole history of this planet: no world war, several distressing diseases beaten for the first time, more people than ever before with enough to eat, and an unparalleled profusion of consumer goods.
He’s right, of course. But that very abundance means choice, and many now face disruptive change, so I come back to arguing: the single biggest reason for the explosion of coaching is it helps us deal with cognitive (over)load.
If you haven’t experienced coaching yourself, what might you expect? We’ll say more shortly, but as a ‘starter pack’:
But, before we all get too excited, coaching is not a panacea. Powerful, yes. The answer to everything, no. Circumstances where it cannot or should not be used include:
* I don’t single out law firms by accident: they are statistically among the most depressed of all occupations. See Seligman, M. (2003) Authentic Happiness, London: Nicholas Brealey, pp. 177ff. A firm where more people are depressed than anywhere else, and some of the cheerful ones are psychopaths, isn’t likely to be a healthy work environment. (Lawyers are exceptional in their incidence of depression, but they’re not alone on psychopathy: its incidence is high compared with the general population in all the glittering pinnacles of global business: see Babiak, P. and Hare, R. (2006) Snakes in Suits, New York: Regan Books/HarperCollins: gripping and essential reading for anyone working in the high-stakes contexts that attract them.) There are, of course, law firms, investment banks, hedge funds, etc. with healthy cultures, but coaches practising in global financial centres need to be alert as to who is offering them work. For more, see Laura Empson’s remarkable 2017 book, Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas, Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Now we’ve got our feet back on the ground – this stuff is good, but it’s not Superman – let’s look at some basic definitions and distinctions.
As coaching has become a ‘good thing’, the word has been spread thinly over almost everything, like raspberry jam. At worst, I once heard a senior accountant say, ‘We coached him out.’ No, you didn’t – you fired him.
If we’re really going to help people, then the terms need to be crystal clear. Hence my basic definition of what coaching is:
traditional mentoring (or training or advising or consulting) puts in advice, content, information. Coaching, by contrast, pulls out the capacity people have within.
So the essence of everything else is downloading – telling people what to do. But the essence of coaching is uploading: drawing out from within, people’s own ideas, hopes, dreams, plans. Already, you’ll see why it works so powerfully:
(For more on why coaching works, see Chapter 12 entitled, imaginatively, ‘Why it works’.)
So mentoring, training, consulting put in; coaching pulls out.
Of course, in practice they blend a little: a good mentor will coach some of the time, and coaches may lob things in occasionally to keep clients on their toes. But, at the heart of coaching, is this ability to pull out from people clear thinking, higher achievement, inspired vision, leadership and fee-earning game-changing performance. (For how to do this, see Chapter 5: it’s simple, but not easy!) Clients vaguely knew they had it within them, but the scale of what they actually leap up to achieving often astonishes them. A bit rubs off on us too: we learn to self-coach, and I observe that coaches are a pretty clear-sighted, quick-thinking bunch: perhaps this is another reason why many have weathered recessions better than most.
Continuing on definitions and distinctions, let’s now look at some of the different flavours coaching and its near-cousins come in.
You know the mantra: mentoring puts in, coaching pulls out. Fifteen years ago, some organisations weren’t clear on this distinction, and indeed one famous organisation had it the wrong way round. But there is now widespread agreement, as there jolly well should be, for the distinction has the ultimate pedigree of Classical antiquity. In Greek myth, Odysseus was about to go off on a voyage. Concerned about his son Telemachus, he consigned the youngster to the care of Mentor, an older, wiser man – and according to some versions of the myth, actually Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, in disguise. A good thing too, as, what with one thing and another, Odysseus ended up being away 10 years. In the meantime, Mentor/Athena brought up the boy, and well – but there was no nonsense about asking questions, Goddesses tell mortals what to do.
Because in modern practice each borrows a little from the other, in day-to-day reality, coaching may not be entirely pull or mentoring entirely push. Instead, two very useful terms define the difference more generically: ‘directive’ means telling (and variants), wherever it occurs, and ‘non-directive’ means drawing the answers out of the client, wherever it occurs. These terms will keep reappearing throughout the rest of the book.
Life coaching covers the whole of your life: diet, fitness, relationships, etc. Business coaching is about business, so the content differs. In terms of the skills used, there is some overlap, as both draw on the same basic skills, but there is one important difference: business coaching is generally a business-to-business sale, while life coaching is generally sold by the practitioner direct to the end user. This has significant implications for contracting. There’s much more on this in Chapter 5; here, I just note that business coaching, where there are several clients, sometimes with conflicting demands, and often across different cultures and time zones, involves considerably greater complexity.
In fact, a better distinction would be between single-stakeholder (‘life’) coaching v. multiple-stakeholder or organisational (‘business’) coaching. The complexity in any organisational context, whether the Government, civil service, military, Church, non-profit, or many other sectors is the same as in business as narrowly defined. But we tend to use the term ‘business coaching’ to subsume all these, perhaps because it’s shorter to say.
In the USA, the two terms are very distinct, with executive coaching meaning working solely with the most senior executives in the organisation, and business coaching usually meaning working with those lower down the organisation chart. In the UK, however, the two terms are more interchangeable, with business coaching usually taken as a comprehensive term to cover both.
The word ‘leadership’ is getting spread around rather; everyone is now a leader. But leadership (or ‘C-suite’ – chief executive officer/chief operating officer, etc.) coaching has somehow avoided that, and still means coaching the toughest people in the firm: those right at the top, who whether their title happens to begin with a ‘C’ or not, have all the executive toys but in some sense the jobs from Hell.
Business, executive and leadership coaching differ little in the skill sets used, but a leadership coach needs to be able to work as an equal with, perhaps, a raging ‘Alpha male/female’ at full throttle – or, these days, a cerebral hedge fund squillionaire. Those who can, come from varied routes, but whatever else they have, they need a tough hide, personal gravitas and the ability to capture a leader’s attention in split seconds.
Much simpler: the clients of a coach are presumed to be well; the clients of a counsellor – or therapist, or clinical psychologist, or psychiatrist – are not: they may be vulnerable, and hence extra procedures are needed to protect their interests. There is also a subtle but important difference in the power relationships. The situation is changing, but, within the ‘medical model’, there is still a slight power differential: practitioners, particularly the white-coated ones, have expertise and the people they work with are called ‘patients’. Coaches by contrast work with ‘clients’, and the power relationship is absolutely that of equals. (For the difference between the various mental health practitioners, see the following box.)
Now let’s look at who uses coaching and what they use it for.
Coaching tends to be bought for senior people. From the organisation’s perspective, this is partly because it’s expensive, whether provided internally or externally. From the supply side, you might think coaches, like everyone else in business, ‘follow the money’ – senior levels are where you can earn most. True, but I also think coaching is naturally more useful in the later stages of a career. At the beginning, young professionals, like it or not, need to be told a great deal. Law, accountancy and medical students spend many years stuffing down technical information, then when they arrive in the workplace it begins all over again as they learn their profession in practice. MBAs structure the intensive learning bursts differently, but they’re still typically in the first half of careers. And along the way there are regular periods of retraining.
But from about mid-career on, it is no longer just a matter of technical competence. The higher you climb, the less charted the waters and the more you have to make your own, often difficult, judgement calls. In addition, to be authentic and charismatic, leaders have to draw out their own genuine vision from within and convey it compellingly. Little of that can be taught, but a lot of it can be coached.
How else is coaching used? In essence, business leaders have coaches for the same reason that athletes do – it’s a mind game. More specifically, typical tasks include:
In this chapter we’ve talked about the pressures on us all in business and how coaching is a growing response to that. You might be beginning to see the lure coaching has for its clients.
But what motivates coaches to enter this fast-growing profession and what do they actually do? In the next chapter we switch from the ‘demand’ to the ‘supply’ side and meet the coaches, in all their various manifestations: some may surprise you!
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