The Hindu Business Line : Getting started on executive coaching

Executive coaching in India is at the same stage that approaches like TQM were when they first arrived — people want to know more, put it to use and even make it their professional practice. Hence, many questions and many dilemmas.

What do coaches do behind closed doors? What can executive coaching do for my organisation and for me? As the CEO or HR leader, how can I set up a coaching process within my organisation? Importantly, how do I go about choosing a good coach? These are some of the questions that people ask.

What executive coaches do behind the closed doors of the company

Executive coaches work with psychologically healthy executives who are performing well, to help them find solutions to their problems and fully utilise their potential.

Coaches are constantly ensuring that there is a goal towards which they and the executive are working, a goal that the executive is committed to and a goal that will give the executive true leverage and value. The coach also helps the executive evolve strategies and action plans that will help him achieve his goals within a defined time frame.

Coaches engage in skilful conversations in which they listen, empathise, probe, discover the real stories, self-disclose, confront, challenge and encourage.

Coaches use behavioural or psychometric tools to assess the executive’s current behaviour or personality preferences to expand his self-awareness and make him aware of the choices available in dealing with new situations and new demands.

Coaches demonstrate the highest level of human values so the executive finds the journey of self-discovery and growth safe and supportive.

What coaching can do for an organisation and the CEO

As a CEO or CXO, coaching can certainly help you improve your professional performance and personal satisfaction and consequently improve your organisation and your own career.

If you need to develop a better behavioural response to emerging organisational situations or acquire a new skill or develop new perspectives or grapple with a huge dilemma or need to think through a life situation that has put you at a cross roads, coaching might be the answer.

You do not need to have a problem to seek executive coaching, only a desire to become more effective.

Seeking a coach is, in fact, a sign of your openness to a rich developmental experience.

If you have identified a group of executives as potential leaders and wish to invest in their development through a range of developmental experiences (as a part of a structured and formal leader development initiative), coaching can certainly be one of the most powerful experiences given that it is customised, one-to-one and works at a very fundamental level.

A coaching oriented style can make your managers, across levels, more effective and enhance employee commitment and retention.

Setting up a coaching process

Like any other long-term initiative, you must take a strategic view of coaching. You must make the well considered choice of incorporating it into your organisation’s developmental framework.

To do this, the first step would be awareness. You may want to expose all your key executives to the basics of coaching and what it can do before starting the journey.

If there is interest, it is best to start right at the top. The endorsement of a satisfied senior is a sure contributor to credibility. Once there is awareness and some early experiential evidence, it is time to put in place the frameworks to institutionalise coaching. This involves decisions such as who will receive coaching, what executive needs will be addressed by coaching, should we attempt to create internal coaches, how do we launch and manage this and so on.

How to choose a good coach

The choice of coaches can either make or break your initiative. Like any other emerging professional practice, coaching has attracted many aspirants. With very few standards, CEOs and HR leaders are often baffled while trying to assess credentials. The methods of coaches are often non-standard and hard to compare and assess. Many coaches are also unable to stand up and explain their coaching model or process in a transparent and lucid manner.

In this context, here are a few simple guidelines to choosing a coach:

Coaches must have undergone adequate training in the practice of coaching. About 200 hours of training including supervised practise is normally considered necessary to gain adequate proficiency. Most importantly, the training must have equipped them with coaching skills at a professional level of proficiency and not at the level that we are used to in our everyday lives.

Coaches must have a reasonable grounding in and awareness of the psychological dimensions of coaching. While coaches are not therapists, they must have a therapeutic sensitivity to the human processes they are dealing with or impacting.

Coaches are not dealing with the individual and his needs in isolation. Coaches must have the business sense and the organisational perspective to be able to view the executive’s needs and problems against this larger context and not in isolation.

Coaches must have good professional credentials. They must have “been there and done that”. They must have a teachable point of view. While skills and values help the coach tune in to the executive’s emotional world, their professional credentials help them tune in to the real world of the executive and understand him fully.

Executive coaching is poised at an interesting stage in India. We have had the benefit of learning from the experiences and mistakes of the rest of the world. Therefore, like the leaps we have been able to make in technology adoption, so too in coaching, we can make a leap of quantum progress.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm. He is also the co-founder of the Executive & Business Coaching Foundation India Ltd. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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Getting started on executive coaching