Coaching and the 'C' words

Gary Neat, National President of the Australian Institute of Management, discusses why a good coach can make a difference.

Credibility. A nice word. Sufficiently powerful to unmask the pretentious and unethical who plague our professional lives. Credibility is hard to gain. Easy to lose. Difficult to restore.

With credibility you leverage a successful career, enhance your organisation and engender meaningful relationships. Without credibility you're left to ponder what went wrong.

Increasingly, the credibility of the burgeoning executive coaching sector is facing scrutiny. We are witnessing an influx of over-hyped, ill-equipped people calling themselves coaches – yet often bereft of business acumen, empathy and analytical skills.

Much of what's being offered is drawn from the heavily hyped US coaching market with a seemingly endless variation of coaching specialisations like life coaching, personal coaching, leadership, experiential, executive, success, corporate, relationship and career coaching. Then there's remedial coaching, retention, change, mentor, developmental and situational coaching.

Let's be clear, good executive coaching is a value-adding contributor to contemporary senior management (just as mentoring is for junior levels), but identifying a credible coach is difficult.

First up, ignore the puffery, and probe for their credentials, leadership experience and coaching portfolio. And just because a coach was once a great CEO, an effective company director or a financial whiz, doesn't guarantee they'll be a master coach.

Word of mouth has limited value in the search for a suitable professional, because any coach who talks about their clients is no coach at all. Coaching is difficult to quantify. I've found that the very personal nature of coaching is what sets it apart from normal professional development or consulting.

Competence. Essentially, the key factors for a good coach must include subtlety, empathy, curiosity, trust, character and insight. The coach must be strong on strategy, good at lateral/creative thinking and able to customise individual coaching programs to suit each executive's particular needs. And there must be mutually agreed objectives.

Top coaches can often be found operating within multi-function teams where the most useful professional backgrounds include organisational development, high-level consulting, psychology and management. Everyone's coaching needs are different, and there's no "one-size-fits-all" approach.

I benefited significantly from informal mentoring early in my own career, but regret the absence during my CEO years of coaches who themselves had felt the "blow torch" of leadership and could have empathised and analysed.

Just as the world itself is becoming more complex, so too is executive coaching. It's assuming an integral role in the lifelong learning paradigm. But remember that coaching is not, as some would have us believe, a solution to all of our workplace flaws. Instead, a master coach is akin to a harbour pilot – being neither ship's captain nor crew, but helping you avoid the shoals so you can steer your vessel on the right course.

Good coaching demands complete confidentiality. The empathy and trust required to optimise the outcome must be founded on highly sensitive interpersonal skills and organisational acumen.

As the coaching industry in Australia matures, it will be those executive coaches and mentors who can differentiate themselves via their credibility and core skills who will enhance their reputation amidst what will inevitably be a sectoral shake out brought about by an influx of ill-equipped practitioners.

Industry accreditation will only be a partial solution to the problem. Financial planners (many of whom should more accurately be termed "financial brokers") are in a sector that has recently gone down the accreditation pathway, albeit with mixed success.

Beware of those theorists who market convoluted, irrational coaching systems to camouflage their own inexperience and professional inadequacy, at the same time creating coaching modules that are easier to mark up.

Finally, why be coached at all? Perhaps because gazing at yourself in the management mirror can give a distorted reflection. And, in a world where complexity and communication increasingly dominate, the objectivity and subtle guiding hand of a coach can help attenuate your management blemishes.

The erosion of the "job-for-life" mentality following the advent of globalisation and the knowledge economy has awakened the more alert among you to the reality of on-going career changes.

Achieving your goals through the savvy selection of a coach/mentor is likely to prove as value-adding a career move in the years ahead as will the choice of appropriate postgraduate studies.

In both these cases, beware the hype.

[Article first published in Management Today, January/Febuary 2006.]