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What coaching can and cannot do for your organization.

Article Excerpt
The authors conducted a survey to measure the organizational impact of coaching. Organizations making greater use of external coaches for senior executives report improved alignment among the leadership team, the team's ability to execute strategy, and leadership behaviors. Greater use of internal coaches is associated with improved teamwork and strategy execution at management levels throughout the organization--high, medium, low. More internal coaching for middle managers appears to improve culture and morale.

Organizations addressing derailment risks through the greater use of internal coaches report positive outcomes; the opposite holds for greater use of external coaches for derailment risks. More internal coaching for solid performers can improve motivation and organization culture, yet they are least likely to receive coaching, compared to high potentials and derailment risks. How coaching is managed also affects organizational outcomes: Organizations that use central coordination of coaching and evaluate its effectiveness report better results. What is measured appears to affect what happens.

Interest in executive coaching is on the rise, and many organizations have made coaching an integral part of their leadership development programs. Although much has been written about how coaching can benefit individuals, coaching as a corporate endeavor remains remarkably unexamined, with scant analysis of the value derived at the organizational level. Ask a dozen HR leaders how their organizations design, deliver, and evaluate their coaching initiatives, and you will likely get a dozen different answers--if they can answer at all. Says leadership expert Jay Conger, "Coaching is one of the great gold rushes in the field of leadership development. Indeed 'thar is gold in them hills' but no one really knows which hills. To make matters more complicated, the techniques are still being worked out."

To bridge this knowledge gap, the authors conducted a research study to identify enterprise-wide best practices in coaching. We define coaching as one-on-one interventions with an individual who is not the executive's supervisor, where the focus is on job-related issues such as demonstrating leadership behaviors, new job transitions, and job performance/avoiding derailment. The emphasis is on building the executive's ability to deal with the issues using his or her own decision making skills, versus telling him or her the specific actions to undertake.

We conducted initial interviews with 10 companies to identify the issues for the survey, then surveyed a broader sample of 55 companies regarding how they manage and measure coaching and other feedback tools. The survey was conducted on-line, targeting individuals with responsibility for leadership and organization development in large companies. The typical survey respondent was the person responsible for coaching initiatives in his or her organization, with a title of manager, director, or vice president of HR in leadership development, talent management, or organization development. Most of the companies (80%) are multinationals, with mean 2003 annual sales of $18.5 billion (median $10.0 billion), and 34,000 median employees. With the exception of one responding company, which had only $1 million in sales, all the other respondents had at least $400 million in annual sales, and 95 percent had sales greater than $1 billion. Thus the sample is dominated by large companies.

The study focused on the following questions:

1. To what degree does coaching influence organizational capabilities, including teamwork and execution; communication; and employee motivation, organizational culture, and values?

2. Do organizations that use coaching more extensively perceive greater effectiveness?

3. Are internal versus external coaches better suited for achieving certain outcomes?

4. How much do companies manage the coaching process and measure the impact?

One potential concern about the survey ratings is that they are self-reports; thus, organizations making greater use of coaching may have responses biased toward indicating positive coaching impacts. To address this, in the interviews used to design the survey we probed for the respondents' attitudes toward coaching. Despite the fact that the typical respondent plays a role in monitoring or coordinating coaching in his or her organization, our interview results indicated the respondents were not necessarily enamored of their organizations' utilization of coaching. To the contrary, they almost unanimously were constructively skeptical that coaching as currently applied in most organizations yields large benefits for everyone receiving it.

One reason for their skepticism was the disorganized approach to coaching today. Often, individual managers engage external coaches one-on-one with little oversight from leadership or organization development specialists who could help improve decision making about coaching. One area of concern is the initial decision to use coaching, versus a possibly better use for the coaching dollars targeted toward other staffing,...

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