The Leader as Coach: What is the Buzz About?

Before we delve deeper into the recognition of the value of coaching in the workplace and how quickly it is currently spreading as an orientation to benefit organizations, let’s look briefly at the history of coaching.

What is coaching?

A coach views a client’s challenges and potential as an objective party, enabling the client to find the best path for themselves. A coach acts as a guide, reflecting with clients to discover the answers within them. Therefore, good coaches explore, motivate, observe, and reflect.

• Explore the basic rules of a fulfilling life based on the client’s needs and personality.
• Equip you with proven tools and techniques to develop the client’s best self.
• Monitor the client’s experience and adapt the personalized approach to utilize their skills and abilities best.
• Anticipate obstacles and guide the client to discover solutions in time.

These techniques work well in individual, group, and team settings and across a broad range of personal and organizational development goals. Coaching has accelerated from a personal growth endeavor focus to an organizational and leadership competitive advantage over the past few decades.

A brief history of coaching

The concept of coaching as an endeavor of humans to gain knowledge and enlightenment has been around since the ancient civilizations. However, the origins of modern life coaching can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s by applying similar principles from other areas. As such, life coaching drew inspiration from works such as the 1974-book “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey that recognized the influence of the ego-mind, or conscious identity, on performance.

One of the mavens of the 1980s, colloquially known as The Transmitters, financial adviser Thomas Leonard, found that his clients often needed help in other areas of their lives than finances, which happened to be a symptom of a more significant issue. Leonard started calling himself a life coach and drew knowledge from different fields, thereby beginning to shape a coaching methodology. Practitioners and scholars looked toward expert areas such as psychology, philosophy, business, sport, and more recently, neuroscience, to inform the budding coaching framework.

Other pioneers, like John Whitmore and Graham Alexander, spread the ideas in the United Kingdom and Europe in the 1980s, leading to the popularity of the GROW model and recognition of life coaching as a distinct profession.

To date, GROW, the acronym for setting Goals, assessing Reality, brainstorming Options, and deciding What to do, remains the most used and referenced coaching model with which to structure and replicate progress in and across multiple sessions.

With the turbulent 1990s bringing competitive challenges to big corporations, including outsourcing, contracting, increased job turnover, and leadership vacuums, coaching found impetus in the business arena. IBM was the first large company that used coaching to improve productivity. By 2000 life coaching was well-established and widely known.

Now well into the 2000s, life coaching continues to be a success story. Instead of focusing on the dysfunctions and vulnerabilities of clients, coaching emphasizes their strengths and potential. Steeped in the concepts of positive psychology, coaching seeks growth and positive change that will transform the client to an above-baseline functioning.

Despite the tremendous growth and potential, life coaching still lacks the uniformly applied regulation and certification standards to ensure a high level of delivery. A recent article published by the International Coach Federation (ICF), expects the value of the life coaching industry to reach $20 billion by 2022. Although there are a variety of professional certification programs available, many coaches do not undergo coach-centered training and are not certified coaches. Therefore, analysts agree that the trend of training and qualifying coaches in accordance with accreditation bodies such as the Association for Coaching (AC), the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC), and the International Coaching Federation (ICF) will be an important boost the industry and its clients.

So, having established the exciting growth of coaching worldwide and the need for credible skills development, contemplate the following industry-definitions of coaching before we apply them in a leadership context.

More Definitions of Coaching

Earlier, I have briefly referred to Whitmore’s description of coaching as “unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance.?It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” This remains a concise statement linking potential to performance in a non-directive way.

Similarly, the Association for Coaching (AC) emphasizes the collaborative, outcome-based process to facilitate growth. More specifically, they define coaching as “a collaborative, solution-focused, result-orientated and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, life experience, self-directed learning and person growth of the coachee.”

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) recently redesigned their definition of coaching to replace the previous emphasis on goal-achievement and an outcome-directed effort to highlight collaborative reflective processes. They describe coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

Using the briefest terms, Downey simply refers to coaching as “the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another.”

So, what do these definitions tell us? Coaching is a process of collaboration and reflection that enables the client to learn and grow, thereby achieving goals important to them. It is about their wellbeing and satisfaction and functioning and performing to their fuller ability. In the true spirit of positive psychology, it is about focus on strengths instead of weaknesses. About building the good in life instead of repairing the bad. It is about taking the lives of average people up to “great” instead of focusing solely on moving those who are struggling up to “normal” (Peterson, 2008).

From Psychotherapy to Leader as Coach

With this intention and promise, coaching is rightly emerging as a major professional development and performance enhancement process. Much of the earlier literature on coaching has been written by those with psychotherapy perspectives, which, for the most part, assume a slightly different relationship and outcome. Life coaching, on the other hand, is ring-fenced by a non-directive, client-paced process that may have a longer or shorter view and outcome(s) defined at varying degrees.

Many businesses and managers themselves, however, seek focused solutions to immediate problems. They need to be competitive to survive. For everyone to fulfil their allotted role. While the wellbeing and satisfaction of employees are important – for human reasons but also because it is linked to many productivity factors, organizations and leaders must balance employee and organizational needs fairly and sustainably.

One of the most effectives ways with which to accomplish such a balance is to learn and use coaching skills as a leader.

“How does this work without placing a bigger burden on me, as a leader with a plate full of responsibilities or cost to the company?” is the question that I hear most often when introducing the subject.

The answer is amazingly simple!

Distinctions of the Leader as Coach

As a leader, you regularly engage with the people you lead and your team, right? Hopefully, you have frequent conversations to let them know expectations, the goals and vision of the organization, and their role and contribution. You assess their resource and development needs. And, in general, how they balance their private life with their career.

With transactional managers, these conversations are most often directive. In other words, you show and tell them how to do things. You instruct, prescribe, educate, and train. At the most, you suggest solutions and ask closed questions to lead them to what you believe is the best solution to help them grow and perform.

But have you ever stopped to think if there is a better way? Commanding is such an old-school, authoritarian approach. It may work well for routine and simple tasks but, face it, your idea of a solution or, indeed, what the problem might be, probably needs a second thought. People don’t like to be told what to do. Having no say or choices is disempowering. They may start to feel dissatisfied, disgruntled, even. They want to push back but fear reprisal. They want a voice. They want to feel that they have a stake in the outcome. In their future.

This is where a coaching approach can make a tremendous difference.

As indicated in Figure 1, the leader as coach puts the employee in control in the conversation. ??

Figure 1: Coaching – Who is in Control? (Source: Marie Faire )

They do this by asking open-ended, non-leading questions. By listening actively and with 100% presence. They clarify and reflect what the person has said to confirm that they have heard and understood.

Such a conversation is much more empowering and encouraging trust. We all know that rapport is a prerequisite for any communication to be effective, facilitated by trust and a safe space, right?

Next time you speak to an employee, only ask questions and listen. Coaching assumes that the client has the resources – inner and external, the creativity, and the ability to find the answers to their needs and issues within themselves. When these conditions exist, a coaching conversation is appropriate and potentially very effective.

As a leader, however, we also know and must be able to determine when the conditions are not met and commanding, mentoring, teaching, and training are probably better options. It’s all about recognizing and balancing the resources and needs of the individual with the needs of the company.

Therefore, one of the key responsibilities of a good leader is to determine the most effective option at any time. If everything is in place, including the training and practice of the leader’s coaching skills, there is nothing more effective and empowering than a coaching conversation.

How can you get started (apart from developing your skills)?

Three Tips to Get You Started

Begin to practice your coaching practices with a few simple steps. As a leader, do not overcomplicate or formalize the process unnecessarily. Grant and Hartley suggest the following ideas.

Tip 1: Role model leadership coaching skills. Ask yourself: As a leader, how can I better role model positive coaching behaviors? Consider effective questioning and listening in all your interactions.

Tip 2: Pay attention to the way that you listen. Tell yourself: Today, I will pay attention to the way that I listen to others and adjust my listening style to become a better listener and thinking like a leader as coach.

Tip 3: Recognize the personal strengths of others at work. Tell yourself: Today, I will take the time to recognize and acknowledge the personal strengths of others at work. This is a core principle of positive psychology and the coaching orientation.

As you are reorganizing your existing staff conversations around new principles of coaching instead of always directing, you will probably not spend much additional time in the process. The only additional investment required from your organization is training leaders to use coaching in their work spaces and with their teams.

Article Citation

Swart, J. (2022, February 14). The leader as coach: What is the buzz about? The Leader as Coach, 4. Retrieved from https://www.dhirubhai.net/newsletters/the-leader-as-coach-6887737857063186432/

About the Author

Dr. Joan Swart, MBA and PSYD (forensic psychology), is the Corporate Programme Director at Coaching Minds , an executive coach and accredited supervisor at the Association for Coaching . Email [email protected] for more information.

References

Brock, V. G. (2014). Sourcebook of coaching history (2nd ed.). Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace.

Downey, M. (2003). Effective coaching: Lessons from the coach’s coach (3rd ed.). London: LID Publishing.

Gray, D. E. (2006). Executive coaching: Towards a dynamic alliance of psychotherapy and transformative learning processes. Management Learning, 37(4), 475-497. DOI: 10.1177/1350507606070221

Grant, A. M., & Hartley, M. (2013). Developing the leader as coach: insights, strategies, and tips for embedding coaching skills in the workplace. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 6(2), 102-115. DOI: 10.1080/17521882.2013.824015

Ibarra, H., & Scoular, A. (2019, November-December). The leader as coach. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-leader-as-coach

Peterson, C. (2008, May 16). What is positive psychology, and what it is not? Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/336vizZ

Whitmore, J. (2006). Coaching for performance (3rd ed.). London: Nicholas Brealey.

Wildflower, L. (2013). The hidden history of coaching. New York: Open University Press.