The Hindu Business Line : Corporates look for `business coach'

John Buchanan is celebrated as Australia's most successful cricket coach. Greg Chappell attracted a lot of attention and even criticism for his coaching style. Bob Woolmer lost his life, playing the role of a coach.

In this World Cup more than any other, the role of coaches came into great prominence. The world seemed to recognise the critical role that they can play in developing talent and improving individual and team performance.

Far from the world of cricket, another breed of coaches is gaining in prominence, albeit in a far less visible way. More and more business leaders are seeking to partner with coaches who can hold a mirror, serve as a sounding board and challenge and inspire them in their leadership journey. Business leaders are also seeing the urgent need for their managers to become more coaching oriented in their style of management, especially with the large number of young employees they are expected to lead.

Inspiration from many fields

John Buchanan has led Australia to 16 straight Test match wins and 14 one-day wins since 1999 when be became the coach.

Like the successful Australian team, most successful CEOs around the world are supported by some remarkable executive coaches, working silently behind the scenes. Business leaders realise that with the support of good coaches they can win in a competitive world.

In fact, coaching, which is a multi-disciplinary field, drew its inspiration from the fields of sports psychology, counselling, adult education and consulting.

Sport psychology involves preparing the mind of an athlete or sports person, just as thoroughly as one prepares the body. Similarly, counselling, especially the person-centred approach founded by Carl Rogers in the 1940s, saw the therapist as one who provided the conditions necessary for the client's growth through the display of genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.

Exponents of adult learning believed that learning, for adults, was often about grappling with dilemmas rather than finding exact answers. They realised that adults wanted to dialogue rather than be directed.

According to Jagdish Seth and Andrew Sobel (in their book Clients for Life) Client Value = Insight x Collaborative Relationship. In their opinion, the best consultants became trusted advisors.

What is Coaching?

Coaching is often defined as a powerful dialogue and conversation between a facilitator and a learner within a productive, result-oriented context. Coaching facilitates the exploration of needs, motivations, aspirations, skills, and thought processes to assist the individual in making real, lasting change. It is specific, need-based, time-bound, meaningful and measurable.

A professional coach, who is typically hired by an individual or organisation, specialises in one of the many emerging domains of coaching, including life skill, job skill, business, and executive.

The case for coaching

How do we explain the sudden demand for coaching? How did leaders manage in the past? What has changed?

Indian organisations of every form have had a long and rich tradition of transmitting wisdom — from one generation to the other, from seniors to juniors, from gurus to sishyas. In that sense a helping relationship is integral to our culture.

A reasonable tenure and a stable boss-subordinate relationship meant that coaching conversations happened quite naturally.

As Indian businesses witness unprecedented and exciting global opportunities for human capital-led economic growth, they are also witnessing unprecedented challenges in sustaining this traditional helping relationship.

Managers are today so caught up in task and transaction that they just do not have the time to engage in coaching conversations. Many who have reached leadership positions in a hurry do not even know how to have these conversations.

Organisations are also realising that the traditional hierarchy-based system of transmitting wisdom will now need to be replaced by more egalitarian and partnership-based helping alliances.

If attracting and retaining talent is a challenge, developing talent is equally challenging. Organisations are realising that traditional training solutions are not yielding the desired results.

They realise that unless the supervising manager is involved in the development process, any worthwhile learning and change does not take place.

In fact the Centre for Creative Leadership, in one of their publications, had identified this "developmental relationship" as one of the six developmental experiences essential to leadership development.

Similarly, corporate leaders (Managing Directors/CEOs/Business Heads) and entrepreneurs who have to manage in an increasingly complex environment are seeing the need to partner with someone who can help them navigate through these business challenges and also realise their full potential.

Organisations are, therefore, seeing the need for a much more formal coaching culture and helping alliance to bridge the wisdom void, develop talent and enhance performance.

While organisations will need the help of external coaching professionals to work with their leaders across levels, they will also need to help all their managers become more coaching-oriented in their style of management so that an organisation-wide coaching-oriented culture prevails.

Some hurdles — and hope

In a high attrition world where boss-subordinate relationships are transient, most managers wonder why at all they should invest in a helping relationship. `What's in it for me,' they ask?

While organisations espouse the cause of a coaching style, they ultimately reward the managers who get the numbers, at any cost. Managers soon realise what is good for them.

Similarly, while many boards realise that their CEOs could do with some help in their leadership style, they are afraid to rock the boat. Given the shortage of leadership talent, they choose to live with the rough edges.

The impediments not withstanding, the good news is that I see many in corporate India evincing serious interest in leveraging the power of coaching. In fact, I see coaching fast emerging as one of the most powerful vehicles of leadership development in India.

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

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