Appendix D
COMBINING COACHING AND CONSULTING FOR POWERFUL RESULTS
Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart has detailed the methods and skills essential to coaching leaders. I’ve focused largely on the one-to-one relationship between the coach and the executive. While Chapter Ten is addressed to consultants who want to develop a larger coaching practice, this Appendix provides ideas for coaches doing one-to-one work who want to tackle larger organizational change efforts. Your clients may request your assistance in larger change agent arenas or invite you to join them in the live-action work within their organizations.
Most of my coaching is part of a larger partnership with the executive concerning an organizational initiative that she launches. Since consulting and coaching are mutually reinforcing, the client efforts benefit from such a powerful combination. The consulting /coaching process allows the executive to have an impact on a larger part of the organization in a shorter time. In addition, the coaching deepens the executive’s commitment to sustain her organizational change goals and outcomes. Any effective consultation process includes ongoing coaching as an integral part of the work and can make significant contributions to organizations.
These gains result when the leader strongly sponsors both the executive coaching and other organizational change efforts. Then the coach-consultant can intervene on multiple levels in the company by using many change agent roles: interviewing, facilitating, training, coaching of other leaders in the system, and other roles as well. Ongoing coaching of the executive empowers these extensive organizational efforts with greater effectiveness.
Before turning to how coaching and consulting can be combined, I briefly discuss the results of such an undertaking. They highlight the benefits of offering a fuller set of services to executives.
The Client’s Results
Following are actual results clients have achieved during executive coaching processes that link executive coaching with larger consulting interventions in the executive’s company:
• The company’s market share moved from bottom to top rank.
• The manufacturing plant ascended from the lowest to highest production quantity.
• Where previously no department connected its work to the organization’s bottom-line goals, every department reorganized to deliver on the three major goals of the company. This change resulted in sustaining membership in the “top three” rating on a national customer satisfaction index.
• An HR department that delivered basic personnel benefits and policies transformed itself into a full-service HR department linking organizational development work along with personnel administration and delivery.
• In a company in which executives were protected from hearing bad news from peers and direct reports, subordinates began giving consistently straight feedback throughout the company. This led the company to be rated by outside auditors as the least politicized company they had experienced.
• Strained and combative management-union relationships were replaced by significant collaboration on business decisions.
Combining Coaching and Consulting
There are numerous approaches to creating organizational change. Surveying the theory and process of organizational consulting is beyond the scope of this book.1 Following, however, is a sample of how putting consulting and coaching together can produce powerful results. Five tenets underlie this work:
1. Link business results to work relationship behaviors.
2. Build the leadership capabilities of the executive, particularly in the areas of articulating positions clearly (backbone) and staying in a strong relationship with the team (heart). This includes the ability to manage productive conflict (backbone and heart).
3. Provide live-action coaching and consulting interventions while the executive and the team are conducting real work.
4. Develop individuals within the work group to bring their own leadership forward as they take initiative involving productive collaboration and challenge.
5. Encourage and stimulate a stronger relationship between the executive and her team of direct reports.
Encouraging the interplay of these items between an executive and a work team produces powerful results such as those listed above.
Here are some of the consulting activities that, with strong sponsorship from the client, can contribute to this productive dynamic. Notice the classic blend of consultation with coaching. Effective outcomes result when you work this traditional blend along with a systems perspective to uncover, identify, enhance, or change the strong patterns operating in the executive and the team arising from their co-created interactional field. Many moments of individual discovery and behavioral change create the possibility for greater team effectiveness. The classic consulting process has listed the companion coaching activities in each category.
Consulting and Coaching Activities
• Consulting: Contract with the executive for work with him and his immediate team.
Coach the executive during the contracting process outlined in Chapter Five.
• Consulting: Conduct individual interviews of team members.
Coach individuals to identify unique, specific goals to increase their own effectiveness during team meetings.
• Consulting: Hold business meetings, facilitated by the leader, to address actual organizational issues. Provide just-in-time training by using models that develop crisper visions, goals, decisions, commitments, and action plans regarding the business issues.
Coach the leader and the team in live-action sessions while they conduct their business.
Coach the leader in debriefing and planning sessions between meetings.
• Consulting: Train the leader and the team in interactional skills to develop their resources in uncovering information, talking directly to each other, managing conflict, and making decisions.
Coach individuals during training practice sessions.
Coach during training debriefings.
• Consulting: Identify staff and operations areas of the organization that need further development.
Coach the executive to build strong sustaining sponsor leaders across the organization.
Coach the executive during meetings she leads with these sustaining sponsors.
Coach the executive to ensure successful project management implementation across the organization.
Coach designated leaders in the organization who have a high impact on the business.
• Consulting: Train designated executives to become more effective coaches to their direct reports.
Coach leaders as needed on their coaching skills.
• Consulting: Train an internal group to become coaches and continuing change agents in the organization.
Coach these individuals as needed.
A range of skills is required for the activities catalogued above. The list of competencies in the next section gives you a sense of what is necessary to expand your practice to include a blend of consulting with coaching.
Consultant Competencies
Although one-to-one coaches need to have many of the competencies listed here, consultants need to master all of them. They work on larger processes, ones that often affect a whole department, division, or the entire company. They intervene in multiple arenas simultaneously. Consultants play the other roles listed here that exceed coaching—for example, project manager, trainer, and meeting facilitator.
There is a great deal of overlap between these skills and the management competencies cited in Chapter Eight. When it comes to enhancing people’s performance at work, executives and consultants share much of the same people skill requirements, though they use them in distinctly different roles. You can use this list to assess the range and depth of your current change agent skills.
| Systems functioning | Expands awareness of the presenting issues to include (1) the systems patterns at play, (2) the function of the organization’s infrastructure, (3) the emotional tugs underlying |
| organizational issues, and (4) the larger communities that affect the organization. | |
| Includes oneself as an important player in co-creating the patterns at work in the system. | |
| Works to increase own and others’ resilience in functioning within the system and between intertwined systems. | |
| Strengthening sponsorship | Educates and coaches clients in sustaining critical dimensions of their sponsorship. |
| Ensures that clients create role clarity and distinctions between themselves as sponsors and their change agents. | |
| Declines duties that undermine the relationships and responsibilities that sponsors and implementers have to one another. | |
| Project managing | Educates and coaches clients to (1) give specific direction and identify key roles, responsibilities, and time frames for projects, (2) allocate the people resources necessary for each project, (3) identify the decision makers, (4) clarify the single point agent for the project, and (5) sponsor the kickoff. |
| Acts as single point agent in designated projects to monitor processes and ensures that leaders sustain cross-functional sponsorship. | |
| Facilitating meetings | Develops an agenda, prioritizing items for best use of time. |
| Facilitates discussion to gain maximum participation and input. | |
| Helps group members identify key needs, ideas, and plans for actions. | |
| Uses a variety of group process methods to achieve effective engagement, leading to synergistic results and productive outcomes. | |
| Decision making | Ensures that the sponsor is clear about who has authority for making decisions. |
| Helps the client use several decision styles effectively, for example, consultation, delegation, majority vote. | |
| Promoting conversations | Clarifies the parameters of discussions to maximize their effectiveness. |
| Helps all constituents to be heard and speak to each other directly. Seeks to unearth information and break habitual thinking. | |
| Addresses underlying issues. | |
| Talks about the tough issues. | |
| Takes a learning stance in conversations, that is, can expand one’s position based on others’ input. | |
| Coaching | Promotes leadership and initiative in coachees across all roles in the organization. |
| Gives specific feedback to others about their strengths and challenges, thus building competence and commitment in others. | |
| Helps people clarify their positions while staying connected in their work relationships. | |
| Training | Designs and delivers training linked to strategic organizational goals. |
| Engages trainees’ participation while achieving the intended objectives. | |
| Is capable of facilitating knowledge, attitude, and skill training. Provides clear theory sessions. | |
| Gives easy-to-follow instructions for skill practice. | |
| Advocating | Effectively advocates for ideas and for one’s role in the organization in order to achieve the goals. |
| Uses advocacy to enhance the broader strategic vision of the whole organization. | |
| Communicates understanding and commitment to the larger goals when advocating. | |
| Strategic thinking | Understands the whole picture. Sees complex functions from the broadest perspective. |
| Can weigh external and internal variables that affect the organization’s productivity and results. | |
| Comprehends business issues and how an organization works. | |
| Can develop ideas to maximize the organization’s effectiveness. | |
| Understanding customer relations | Perceives the customer, vendor, internal customer (employee), and larger community (civic contexts) relationships as mutually reinforcing. |
| Works to streamline processes to aid these relationships. | |
| Visioning | Develops a clear vision for oneself as part of the larger organization. |
| Helps executives identify specific and measurable goals to achieve the vision, and communicates the vision and goals effectively. | |
| Helps clients to engage constituents in conversations to further the vision, gain greater clarity, and increase communal commitment. |
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