Chapters of Books: Management by Coaching – 7 Basic Keys

NOT ANOTHER FAD!

HOW ARE WE DOING AS MANAGERS

Harris International recently polled some 23 000 full-time workers, managers and executives in the United States and found that only 37 percent had a clear understanding of what their organisation was trying to achieve, and why

‘only 20 percent were enthusiastic about their team’s and organisation’s goals
‘only 20 percent had a clear line of sight between their tasks and their team’s and organisation’s goals
‘only half were satisfied with the work they had accomplished at the end of the week
‘only 15 percent felt that their organisation fully enabled them to execute key goals
‘only 15 percent felt they worked in a high-trust environment
‘only 17 percent felt their organisation fostered open communication that was respectful of differing opinions and that resulted in new and better ideas
‘only 10 percent felt that their organisation held people accountable for results
‘only 20 percent fully trusted the organisation they worked for
‘only 13 percent had high-trust, highly cooperative working relationships with other groups or departments. (Covey 2004:2-3)

Let’s use a sporting analogy to interpret these results. If a rugby team had these same scores – less than six of the 15 players on the field would know on which side of the field to score

‘only three would even care
‘only three would know what position they played in and would know exactly what they were supposed to do
’12 of the 15 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team rather than the opponents. (Covey 2004:3)

That’s quite an indictment against organisations in the United States, isn’t it? But how similar would results in this country be? Among groups of managers and executives who participate in our manager coaching programmes, the consensus seems to be that the results here would not be significantly different.

WHAT IS OUR JOB AS MANAGERS?

In this book, we provide you, the managers in our organisations, with basic coaching skills so that you will be able to use coaching as your style. Why? So that you can consistently improve the performance of the people who report to you – in other words, to help you to be even more effective in your roles than you are now.

Once again, the question is why – why do we see this as necessary? These days, leaders and managers are, more than ever before, responsible for producing results. However, most of their results are achieved indirectly through the knowledge, skills and commitment of others (Kinlaw 1999:2-3).

Now, giving the members of our team all the knowledge and skills they need is probably the easy part, budget permitting, but will they use them effectively, particularly against the backdrop of the statistics cited above as well as a global statistic that suggests that only between eight and 12 percent of all conventional training hits our workplaces? (Zeus & Skiffington 2001:14) Isn’t that a huge waste of time, effort and, of course, money? Isn’t there more that we can do as managers to up the return we are getting on our training investment? Small wonder that an increasing number of organisations is questioning their return on training spend, and why the number of seminars and books on the subject of coaching is increasing. Another interesting phenomenon is the number of seminars and books that focus on the return on training spend and how this can be measured – not surprising is it when we are increasingly concerned about the possible ineffectiveness of conventional training?

The good news is that research in the private and public sectors in both the United Kingdom and the United States has shown (and your experience probably bears this out) that, at best, training on its own has a 22,4 percent impact on performance and productivity and that this soon tails back to previous levels of performance. However, when personal coaching is provided over a period of time (say three to six months), that improvement can be as much as 88 percent and is self-sustaining. The reason for this is that the coaching process inculcates a style of thinking that raises the quality of problem solving and decision making and enables participants to start “self-coaching” (Oliviera, Bane & Kopelman 1997:vol 26).

Are the people in our teams able to improve their performance and productivity? By just how much? Ten percent? Fifty percent? Just how much smarter can they work? In all probability, we can’t say exactly; what we do know is that no one has reached his or her full potential and no organisation in the world has been able to fully harness the skills and capabilities of its people in a way that maximises each individual’s performance. And yet, isn’t that exactly what our function is as managers – to maximise the performance of the people reporting to us? Can each one of our people improve his or her performance and productivity by 10 percent? Surely they can. The question, really, is how do we help them achieve this? And how do we help them continue to improve?

So, what would happen if we as managers were able to provide this personal coaching so that performance and productivity went up by say 20 percent? Wouldn’t this be 20 percent better than we are currently getting? And what if we improved our coaching ability so that we consistently achieved in excess of this figure? What difference would it make to our bottom line and other targets?

And what if we were able to do it, not as something extra – for which we don’t have time – but in the normal run of our working day?

WHAT CHALLENGES DO WE FACE AS MANAGERS?

In days gone by we were able to get away with achieving satisfactory results from the satisfactory performance of our people – and this was easy, because, to achieve satisfactory performance, we only needed to put in place a variety of controls to ensure (should that read “force”?) satisfactory results to pop out the other side. In many cases, this required us to be reactive rather than proactive and resulted in our team members creating ways to beat the system. The result was that any success was temporary and seldom above the level of satisfactory performance.

Nowadays, we don’t get away with satisfactory performance, do we? Our responsibility for achieving results has risen enormously and the results required seem to grow exponentially each year – or at least that’s how it feels. The only way to achieve this superior performance is through team members who seek to achieve these results not because they have to, but because they are personally committed to doing so. Accordingly, we need to accept that sustained superior performance is not under the manager’s control, but under the control of the individual performers. After all, our team members have control over what task they will do now, how much energy they will put into that task, how long they will take on it, and how well they will do it. In short, they have total control of their discretionary energy. What happens if they for some reason or another operate less than optimally? What happens if our old ways of managing are unable to ensure that they maximise their performance? Isn’t it our job to channel this discretionary energy in a way that brings about the levels of commitment that will enable them to achieve superior performance and, therefore, superior results? If it’s not our job, then whose is it? And what, then, is our job? (Kinlaw 1999:2-5)

Of course, our challenge is made even more difficult by the fact that most of our organisations have downsized, right-sized, restructured, re-engineered and managed our efficiencies to the point where we feel like we are running on a treadmill, questioning whether we are in fact getting anywhere. The result: we have half the number of people doing three times more work with fewer resources! And this is supposed to be sustainable!

On top of this, less than 60 percent of us have had any training in managing people! And we wonder why we are so stressed?

But what do we know about our people? One thing we intuitively know is that they are more likely to use their discretionary energy and time in pursuit of organisational goals when – they sense that there is enough in it for them they are clear about where the goalposts are and why they are important they are clear on what they have to do to be able to have some influence they feel they are sufficiently competent to achieve these goals they are appreciated for working so hard to achieve these goals. (Kinlaw)

This is where coaching comes in. We believe that coaching is not a fashionable substitute for control – it is not just another, or the latest, fad. The truth is that leaders, at every level and in every organisation, do not have the time or capacity to control any more. We have to empower and delegate to create a culture of responsibility and initiative. If we don’t get this right, we will increasingly feel stressed and ineffectual as more and more responsibility is heaped on our already overburdened shoulders. Accordingly, coaching, leading and managing are, for us, synonymous.

Coaching, managing and leading become effective when we use relationships and dialogue to generate possibilities and growth. It is not simply a matter of learning some new techniques. Coaching is not a technique. It is not an add-on. It is a way of being – the way we see the world, relationships and the organisation.

WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT COACHING ANYWAY?

Around about now (if you didn’t earlier), you are probably asking how we feel we can get away with such blanket statements about how great coaching is and what it can do for you. Well, a surprising amount of research has gone into coaching, even though coaching is, in many respects, still in its infancy. Here are just some examples of research that demonstrates the power of coaching.

In 1979, the Training and Development Journal ran an article indicating that it seemed to be a reasonable expectation of training that it would produce new behaviours which, over time, would lead to improved results. It was found, however, that what actually happens after training, if no coaching is provided, is that old behaviours quickly resurface and sustained performance improvements never materialise. Without coaching, the opportunity that training provides for improving behaviour – and the improved results that could have followed – is lost. We set our people up to fail, therefore, if we don’t provide them with coaching after providing them with behaviourally based skills training. (Crane 2001:22)

In their introduction, Lane and Fillery-Travis (2006:1) state the following:

We can now safely say that coaching isn’t just another HR fad, despite its explosive growth in the last few years. It seems that coaching has arrived and is set to stay. CIPD research certainly suggests that coaching is a growing trend rather than a passing fashion. It is slowly but steadily diffusing through UK organisations and becoming an essential and valuable feature of their learning and development strategies.

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As part of their study, organisations were asked to specify the types of coaching used in their organisation and to rate their effectiveness. The results were as follows:

PERCENTAGE SAYING THIS FORM OF COACHING IS…					PERCEN–TAGE USING THIS TYPE OF COACH–ING
COACHING BY:	VERY EF– FECTIVE	EFFEC– TIVE	NOT VERY EFFECTIVE	INEFFEC– TIVE
line managers	13	54	33	–	96
external coaches	39	52	9	–	92
internal coaches	16	84	–	–	76
members of the HR department	10	74	16	–	76

They however went further than this, as they wanted to find out whether the organisations believed that coaching interventions had specifically resulted in improved organisational and individual performance. This is what they found:

OVERALL, HAVE THE COACHING INITIATIVES YOU IMPLEMENTED HAD AN IMPACT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF (A) THE INDIVIDUAL AND (B) THE ORGANISATION?
PERCENTAGE ANSWERING…
RECEIVING COACHING	YES, OVERALL A POSITIVE IMPACT ON PERFORMANCE	YES, OVERALL A NEGATIVE IMPACT ON PERFORMANCE	NO, OVERALL, NO IMPACT ON PERFORMANCE
Individuals	96	4	–
Organisation	87	–	13

(Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:55-56)

Clearly, the outcomes achieved depend on the issues manager coaching is intended to address. However, the types of results achieved seem to fall into 10 main areas:

‘Making changes to the organisation’s culture or helping to embed a coaching culture
‘Improvements in managerial skills and capability
‘Behaviour change among manager coaches
‘Benefits for team members as a result of receiving coaching
‘Greater employee engagement and commitment
‘Improvements to business indicators or results
‘Savings in HR time/costs
‘Achievement of external awards and recognition
‘Unexpected spin-offs
‘Accelerated talent development. (Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:115)

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Specific issues that organisations are addressing through coaching (external coaching and manager coaching) are the following:

PERCENTAGE OF ORGANISATIONS THAT REPORT USING COACHING FOR THIS PURPOSE
Individual performance issues	89
Skills deficits	79
Transition issues (to a new role or area of work)	79
Career progression	75
Team issues	71
Transformation issues (major change initiatives)	71
Personal, non-work issues	57
Work-life balance issues	50
Diversity/equality issues	25

(Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:57)

A study led by Marshall Goldsmith surveyed more than 8 000 “direct reports” about their perceptions of their managers’ levels of effectiveness after participating in a leadership development programme. Eighteen months later, direct reports were asked – about their manager’s current level of effectiveness to what extent their managers had responded to their feedback and followed up with/coached them.

The data was very clear: the higher the level of coaching or follow-up, the higher the direct reports rated their bosses’ effectiveness:

PERCEPTION OF EFFECTIVENESS AS A PERCENTAGE
	WORSE	SAME	BETTER
No response/No follow-up	19*	34	48
Response/No follow-up	21*	34	45
Response/Little follow-up	10	24	66
Response/Some follow-up	3	9	89
Response/Frequent follow-up	1	5	95
Response/Consistent follow-up	1	4	95

(Keilty, Goldsmith & Company 1994, as cited in Crane 2001:24-25)

Manchester Consulting Inc undertook a major research project to quantify the business impact of executive coaching by external coaches. In a study of 100 executives who had completed a coaching programme between 1996 and 2000, they found that the estimated return on investment was 5,7 times the initial outlay! (Zeus & Skiffington 2002:3)

Management is increasingly recognising that individuals and groups perform better with coaching and that this performance translates into business results. Some of the specific ways in which coaching is beneficial include the following:

Coaching for leadership increases productivity, improves communications, increases commitment and loyalty, and decreases levels of stress and tension within companies.

‘Coaching assists individuals to remain loyal and committed to the company in the face of demanding global business hours, language barriers, differing work ethics and economic fluctuations.
‘Coaching can help prevent executive derailment.
‘Coaching helps managers to develop better interpersonal skills.
‘Coaching helps leaders to think and plan more strategically, to manage, risk more effectively and to create and communicate vision and mission.
‘Coaching aids in developing a culture of trust and personal responsibility within the organisation, and with clients and customers.
‘Coaching can develop those leadership qualities that have been empirically proven to be associated with success, including cognitive capacity, social capacities, personality style, motivation, knowledge and expertise.
‘Coaching helps managers recognise new competencies they and their team members should be learning.
‘Coaching helps leaders and managers to focus on preparing tomorrow’s leaders for the challenge.
‘Coaching enables people to align their personal commitments and actions.
‘Coaching helps managers and team members sustain momentum.
‘Coaching allows manager coaches to align team members with the goals and visions of their organisation.
‘Coaching allows manager coaches to develop team unity and team spirit and enrol others in the new possibilities and breakthroughs.
‘Coaching allows manager coaches to help others expand their levels of responsibility and increase their levels of initiative and creativity.
‘Coaching enables manager coaches to recognise weak links and develop strategies to strengthen these. (Zeus & Skiffington 2002:4-5)

WHY IS THE TIME RIGHT FOR COACHING NOW?

Coaching has become an attractive option for various reasons. Of course, at a personal level, it offers one-on-one personalised support for development. In addition, this development can easily be aligned with the organisation’s strategy and goals, which is another advantage. A third reason is that it fits the complexity and fast pace of modern organisational life. (Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:23) The working environment is moving at a much faster pace than it ever has and this means that organisations and the people working in them must learn and adapt quickly. Alongside this, as management practices and values move away from command and control, the model of manager coach has also evolved (Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:106). Many organisations are trying to move away from “command-and-control” leadership to one where the contribution and development of all employees at all levels in the organisation is facilitated and supported.

Apart from a rapidly evolving business environment, a combination of other factors has led to the growth of coaching within our organisations, including the following:

The focus is on teams to get things done, and on the consequent increased need for improved interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence and self-awareness in order that the team members work more effectively together.
Organisations have become places of continuous change, many of which fail because of the inability of individuals to effectively learn and adapt.
Organisations have become flatter in structure, whilst management roles have simultaneously become broader, and newly promoted managers often need to make large step changes in performance because of the higher requirements of their new roles.
Career progression and personal development are high priorities for talented people, and organisations are required to provide these or risk losing their more talented managers.
Lifelong learning has become a way of life and organisations and individuals are under pressure to get on this bandwagon, if only to keep up.

` The best learning does not take place in a training room, but on the job where more immediate work issues can be focused on in a more relevant manner. (Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:23-26)

Coaching is proving itself to be the most effective means of achieving the objectives in all of these cases. Research has also shown that coaching is considered to be one of the most effective ways of enabling people to learn. Certainly, there has been a shift from training (top-down, instructor-led interventions intended to result in desired changes in employees’ behaviour and knowledge) to learning (a self-directed process by which an individual constructs new knowledge, skills and capabilities leading to increased adaptive capacity). Net increases in the growth of different learning and development activities in the past few years are as follows:

TYPE OF LEARNING	NET PERCENTAGE INCREASE IN GROWTH
Coaching	51
E-learning	47
Mentoring and buddy systems	42
Job rotation, secondment and shadowing	27
Action learning sets	17
External conference events and workshops	11
Formal classroom-based training	8

(Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:21)

HOW DOES MANAGER COACHING DIFFER FROM OTHER COACHING?

Manager coaching has a number of positive characteristics that differentiate it from other forms of internal or external coaching:

` The coaching is focused solely on the fulfilment of business objectives.

` The manager coach will be aware of the performance and perception of

the team member within the organisation.

` The relationship is ongoing, allowing timely intervention.

` The coaching is available to all team members.

The manager coach-team member relationship is a mutually beneficial one. The manager coach depends on the team member to accomplish tasks and work towards team goals, while the team member relies on the manager coach for recognition and to set the conditions for success. Manager coaches are usually concerned solely with improving and developing team and individual performance in line with organisational requirements. Managers with strong coaching skills are able to help team members improve their performance by building their understanding about –

` what effective performance looks like

` how to achieve it

` what skills are required to perform in different circumstances

` what methods of problem solving help and hinder performance

` how to build competence for the future. (Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:109)

WHAT SKILLS DO EFFECTIVE MANAGER COACHES NEED?

` be able to use different management styles according to the needs of the situation

` demonstrate learning behaviours – for example asking questions, experimenting, reviewing success and mistakes

` be good facilitators

` delegate appropriately

` communicate and share learning from different experiences.

These managers were doing a number of related people management activities well. It is not simply a question of teaching managers a few coaching techniques. A quick-fix coaching programme for managers won’t work. Effective manager coaches must have a base of strong people management and development skills, and then be supported in developing some specific coaching skills. (Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:111)

The specific people management and development skills needed as a foundation for coaching skills are perhaps best reflected in a study by Ellinger and Bostrom (1998) (referred to by Lane & Fillery-Travis 2006:112), who identified 13 behaviour sets demonstrated by effective manager coaches:

EMPOWERING BEHAVIOURS		FACILITATING BEHAVIOURS
1.	Question framing to encourage employees to think for themselves	1.	Providing employees with feedback
2.	Being a resource – removing obstacles	2. \	Soliciting feedback from employees
3.	Transferring ownership to employees	3.	Working it out together – talking it through