WHEN COACHING MASKS LEADERSHIP FLAWS, HERE IS HOW NOT TO DO IT?

The new management buzz emerges in the form of coaching.

Some organizations hail coaching as a magic pill in an all-in-one solution for employee engagement.  Up to a point that management overlooks leadership development in favor of coaching programmes.

It is an exception more than the rule if coaching schemes have not weave into the fabric of your organization.  However, leaders can miss valuable leadership lessons if coaching sessions reign supreme as the sole development option.

Coaching Is Flourishing

Loyalists argue the merit of coaching based on people investment priorities. Popularity wise, several publications offer insights about coaching in general.  

 An article by Uta (2019) estimated that the business coaching industry revenue increased to $15 billion in 2019 at an annualized rate of 5.6%. In 2015, the estimated global revenue from coaching was $2.356 billion. 

 Cross reference with the report from Mitchell and Magid (2018) estimated the executive coaching in 2018 to be a $10 billion business in the United States and growing because of effectiveness as compared to leadership training. 

 Being Trendy  

Remarkable positive development in coaching industry draws the attention of organizations with interest to investing in coaching programmes.  

Organizations jump on the coaching bandwagon for social proof as a trendy workplace with the adoption of coaching scheme, which is the flavor of the moment. 

Such to a point of overshadowing organizational development programmes for management and leadership skills. Some organizations are even tempted to favor coaching schemes to replace leadership development programmes. 

Take the story of a global services firm, which some years ago rolled out an organization-wide coaching scheme to address team work and staff attrition issues. During that time, coaching was the trend in corporate development programmes. Hard pressed to follow the coaching trend, the senior management team was adamant to prioritize coaching over leadership development programmes.  

The result was a reduction in the number of staff leaving and improvement in employee engagement scores. Qualitative feedback wrote that staff members were happy with the attention from senior leaders coaching scheme.  

Over time, the uptrend coaching score deteriorated. Unfortunately, team work disintegrated when staff members’ comments surfaced about favoritism with coaching match-making preferences. Over time, the teams increasing fire-fight to douse ad-hoc costly error and omission problems. 

Somehow, relying totally on coaching programmes to compensate for leadership flaws signals a dangerous route for navigating team effectiveness.  

In some organizations, the leadership and coaching distinctions become blurry when both terms are used interchangeably. 

Shift to Coaching from Leadership 

At the side of organizations impressed with coaching ROI, the discussion rarely considers the tradeoff between leadership and coaching initiatives. 

Since coaching impacts across an organization, it can overshadow leadership development programmes. While each has its own positive contribution to the organization, the signs of leadership shortfall require different coping strategies compared to any coaching approach. 

Here are some reasons to consider if you have thought about coaching programmes instead of leadership development. 

Definition Differences 

 If you start with definitions, leading is a part of managing a team and individuals. Whereas coaching is more personal and customized to individual needs. Coaching sessions that pay attention to an individual would not be the same as leadership classes training groups.  

Leading is about inspiring and motivating a team with managing of team work. Coaching mostly concentrates on inspiring the individual toward a motivation to work more effectively as a self-contributor or a team member. For leaders spending most of the time managing, they should be leaning towards working in a team.  

A total focus on coaching would deny leaders the ability to learn on-the-job in teamwork. More so, coaching constraints leaders within a personal parameter of self-improvement. Some believe that a coaching session builds you to development others. For certain management situation requiring direct leadership intervention, coaching may not sit well under the pressure of delivering results on the job at work.  

Failure to think about the differences in definitions compromises organizations to weigh heavily on coaching as a development tool. Staff members lose out on building themselves into leaders with the necessary skills to lead their teams. 

Coaching Favors Over Leadership Development

Leadership development centers around teamwork, communication abilities, inspiring and motivating teams, managing work groups, steering teams and organizations, resolving conflicts, dealing with uncertainty, and so on. After which, the leader strengthens his or her abilities to handle a diverse group of team members.

 Leaders can only learn about helping an individual to connect his or her role to the broader team and organizational objectives if coaching schemes are the only staff engagement choice.  

On the other side, coaching dwells on the personal level of the leader. Participating in a coaching scheme limits a leader to a customized access for his or her personal one-on-one feedback from a coach. Coaching can guide individuals to perform at a higher skills level with a less concentration on the individual’s leadership competencies in general. 

A well-trained leader uses an assortment of leadership skills to bring a team together for dealing with a challenging setback or move beyond uncertain times. A dedicated leadership development programme helps staff to acquire the workplace abilities to effectively navigate organizations. Learning about managing group dynamics is an invaluable lesson to bring a group of people to become a team that grows through stages of development, as described by Tuckman. Coaching sessions would have made you missed the conscious attention to acquire of Tuckman’s model. It is one of the most useful team development frameworks for guiding your own team in recognizing the different feelings and behaviors. Therefore, you are able to offer support as the team members go through each transitional stage (MIT Human Resources, 2021). ? 

The reality is that you can observe a leader’s maturity level through tangible examples, such as the way he or she runs a group meeting or working with the team to formulate a team mission and vision. On the other hand, you will notice that coaching works by initiating a coaching conversation on the side after a meeting to discuss with an individual staff about what could have done differently to improve his or her presentation in a team meeting.  

Having observable outcomes from a successful leadership development programme tackle team and individual’s workplace performance concern, such as:   

• Conflict Resolution. 
• Difficult Employees. 
• Resistance to Change. 
• Low Employee Morale.   
• Lack of Initiative and Responsibilities. 
• Low Motivation. 
• Problems Supervising Peers. 
• Bad Attitudes. 
• Poor Relationships. 

Slightly varies from leadership development, a coaching session influences individual staff member on a personal level with indirect consequences to correct developmental shortcomings of:  

• Establish Goals. 
• Action Towards Achieving Goals.  
• Growth Mindset. 
• Increase Self-reliance.  
• Gain Satisfaction for the Job and Life.  
• Increase Team Contribution. 
• Contribute Effectively to Organization.  
• Willingness to Shoulder Greater Responsibility. 
• Ownership and Accountability for Actions and Commitments. 
• Work Easily and Productively with Others in A Team.  
• Communicate More Effectively.   

Too much time spent on coaching skills starves a staff from leading a team effectively through applying hands-on management. Leaders learn valuable lesson through direct handling of business and people matters in real time. Whereas, coaching sessions are seldom administered at the critical moment when an event occurs.  

General coaching models work on self-reflective exercises coupled with future-pacing an objective to be achieved later. For example, leaders would practice writing an engaging letter after an effective leadership communication class while coaching is about pointing out to the staff to be aware of alternatives in writing a responsive email. Following a coaching pathway to development staff members comes at the expense of real-world actionable intervention of leadership on-the-job.  

It can also be said that coaching is mostly reactive and descriptive while leadership practices are proactive and prescriptive. If you analyze any coaching model, a common trait that exists is about you dissecting historical events to form a basis for branching out your options for improvement in the future. Leadership programmes would rather train the staff on “why-what-how" to deal directly with a business and people event. Leadership actions on the broader organization objectives describing the support from various goals and tasks towards achieving them.  

Time limitations let us appreciate short and near-term results in a leadership programme. Agile leaders mastering change can focus on adapting to uncertainty in a nick of time. We need creative and innovative leaders, who can leap-frog effortlessly between strategic and operational efforts. Depending on coaching is a setback to deliver results in a crisis. Coaching is a longer-term project, which seldom work in critical situations for swift decisions with fast actions.  

Most coaching process may take longer to deliver results that may be realized easily through leadership development training. An example can be found in leading a team through a business crisis of computer crashing simultaneously.  

A leader trained in risk management and emergency protocols gains the business with a swift recovery plan with the team. Imagine coaching a leader in an emergency without the luxury of time for a coach to go through several steps in a coaching model can compromise a prompt dousing of an urgent fiery incident. 

Being intentional with leadership development closely mirrors the 70, 20, and 10 development model. The 70-20-10 model promotes a comprehensive attendance of structured training with guidance from a supervisor to reinforce the skills development when applying on-the-job (CCL, 2011). This holistic leadership development approach equips you with a set of leadership tools for performing at the workplace.  

Still referring to the 70-20-10 model, coaching rests in the 20% of developmental initiative grounded in social learning among peers. Based on this model, coaching is neither a structured learning in a formal format of 10% nor is it situated in the moment for on-the-job training guidance from supervisor. Here, a coach can steer you through a coaching process without being an operational expert. This often compromise your ability to deep-dive into a work issue when you go through a coach session without dwelling into the nuts and bolts. 

Balancing Coaching with Leadership Development 

Status of coaching scheme can inch nearer to complement a leadership development programme when position as performance coaching.  

Doing performance coaching “facilitates the development and action planning of another, in order that the individual can bring about changes in their lives. Performance Coaching is not advice giving and does not involve the coach sharing their experience or opinions” (Purple Tree Coaching and Training, 2018).  

We can add Reviewsnap’s (2017, February) explanation of performance coaching as a series of conversations to enhance employee well-being and performance involving both leaders and staff working together to develop their skills and performance to the next level. If you go through the performance coaching technique, you can lead with less focused on yourself so that you can manage by connecting with issues your workers experience and you can work with staff to continually review progress that sustains their effectiveness (Reviewsnap, 2017).  

With relevance to the 70-20-10 development model on coaching, performance coaching expands from 20% to 70% with “a step beyond training in that it provides on-the-job training to employees while inspiring advancement” (Reviewsnap, 2017). 

?Leadership combines with coaching is a goodness to staff development within Ibarra and Scoular’s (2019) article “The Leader as Coach”, which denoted coaching as a leadership tool to address a collection of difficult workplace performance.  

Going with leader as coach places coaching in the performance dynamic balancing with 40% time on leading, 30% on coaching for performance and 10% on managing. Naturally if you move down to middle managers with supervisory role and operational responsibilities, the percentage would differ within 30% time on leading, 30% on coaching for performance and 40% on managing. Indeed, you can adjust the right balance as long as you keep the dynamic duo of leading and coaching in proximity of each other.  

In conclusion, coaching is an important addition to people management strategy while leadership development should stand firm as an evergreen pillar of a strong organization. We have discussed at length about the significant advancement of coaching without forgetting the crucial contribution of leadership development.  A blissful marriage of both people development initiatives is a smart balancing act of a progressive and forward-looking organization. 

* This article was inspired from a sharing by M.KK, a senior leader of a prominent Malaysia-based market leader corporation.

References 

Annual Coaching Survey - Sherpa Executive Coaching | Cincinnati Ohio. (2016). Retrieved January 28, 2021, from Sherpa Executive Coaching | Cincinnati Ohio website: https://www.sherpacoaching.com/annual-executive-coaching-survey/ 

?Boysen, S., Cherry, M., Amerie, W., & Takagawa, M. (2018). Organisational Coaching Outcomes: A comparison of a practitioner survey and key findings from the literature. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.24384/000475 

?CCL. (2011) The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development. Retrieved February 7, 2021, from Center for Creative Leadership website: https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/70-20-10-rule/ 

?Ibarra, H & Scoular, A (2019) The Leader as Coach. . Retrieved February 7, 2021, from Harvard Business Review website: https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-leader-as-coach 

?Mitchell, C. & Magid, J. (2018) Measuring the Value of Coaching: A Leading Approach. (2018, December 11). Retrieved January 28, 2021, from Training Industry website: https://trainingindustry.com/articles/leadership/measuring-the-value-of-coaching-a-leading-approach/ 

MIT Human Resources. (2021). Using the Stages of Team Development | Retrieved January 31, 2021, from Mit.edu website: https://hr.mit.edu/learning-topics/teams/articles/stages-development 

?Purple Tree Coaching and Training (2018) What is Performance Coaching? . Retrieved February 7, 2021, from Purpletree4u.com website: https://www.purpletree4u.com/faqs/what-is-performance-coaching/ 

?Reviewsnap (2017, February) Performance Management Software for Everyone. Retrieved February 7, 2021, from Reviewsnap - Performance Management Software for Everyone website: https://www.reviewsnap.com/blog/5-things-to-look-for-in-a-performance-coach/ 

?Uta, J. (2019) Business Coaching Industry to top $15 billion in 2019. (2019). Retrieved January 28, 2021, from Brand Minds website: https://brandminds.live/business-coaching-industry-to-top-15-billion-in-2019/ 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Wong Siong Lai

I write on EXCEL-HRD from my work with leaders and organisation on HRD solutions to meet the bottom line.

Follow me on LinkedIn.

Find and interact with me on Facebook

Search and let's discuss more at Linkedin group : Virtual Network for Human Performance Technology

Know about my HRD solutions in MasterKeynote

?Do add your comments and share this article if it tickled your thought. Much appreciate with thanks.