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Jan 17 2018

Why do we traditionally only coach leaders?

By Alice Pilbeam-Brown

Coaching has been the most rewarding part of my career to date, and since completing my ICF professional coach training in summer 2017 I’ve completed over 100 hours of coaching. There are many definitions of coaching, but my favourite is by the UK's most experienced executive coachers, Jenny Rogers;

“The coach works with clients to achieve speedy, increased and sustainable effectiveness in their lives and careers through focused learning. The coach’s sole aim is to work with the client to achieve all of the client’s potential – as defined by the client. (Rogers, 2008)”

My own definition is somewhat similar;

“Coaching is a safe, non-judgemental, learning space for exploration, practice and development, where the client sets out their own (or shared with their leaders’) objectives and takes accountability for driving forward their development. As a coach I believe all clients are capable of flourishing, in whatever way they need to, to bring true enjoyment in their life and value to their current organisation and career.”

The reasons for coaching leaders

In a world where there are more CEO’s in the S&P 1500 named John than there are women CEO’s*, the question of “Why do we traditionally only coach leaders?” really piqued my curiosity!

I got in touch with some of my clients, my fellow coaches, senior leaders across my organisation and other learning and business professionals to help me answer this question. There were 3 key themes that came out of their feedback:

1. Coaching is expensive/ Coaching is time consuming 
2. Coaching is only effective as part of a blended approach to learning 
3. We have a fixed mind-set when it comes to coaching

All these themes I found fascinating to explore and couldn’t disagree with any of them.

The cost of coaching

I agree, coaching is more expensive than other learning interventions and at an average of £1,100 per hour for coaching in the UK, and with most coaches recommending six sessions to see significant behavioural change, this intervention per person would cost approximately £6,600.

Despite this, there are so many more benefits to coaching in comparison to traditional training. Coaching can effect the motivation the client feels to grow and develop and how 'invested-in' the individual feels by the organisation. As well as this, the bespoke nature of the coaching really taps into their values, motivations, personal aspirations as so forth; and I haven’t even mentioned the sustainable change witnessed in the client!

I could go on!

There will always be a need for traditional open course training and I’m a huge believer in the benefits of this. However, coaching can create more sustainable change and better overall outcomes.

Coaching as a part of a blended learning approach

No single learning intervention alone will help someone really develop, and there’s an interesting model called the 70:20:10 model which essentially offers us three different ways to learn; on the job, with others and in traditional learning environments. So how does this open up our thinking to blended learning?

I don’t for one minute disagree that most of our learning happens when we’re “doing”, but what if our time “doing” was through a different approach such as through conversations with your coach or mentor? Our time with others could mean at-desk coaching, delivering and receiving feedback or setting up a buddying system. And what if that 10% of traditional learning was a combined approach, a workshop this month, an online course the next, a couple of 'learn and lunches', some reverse mentoring, some coaching and so forth! Our attention spans are getting shorter, so we need to be more creative with different ways of learning and really capitalise on our preferred learning style(s).

Our mind-sets around coaching

There are various reasons why leaders are often signposted to coaching, here are just a few of the ‘traditional’ ones:

• The level of “deep” emotional or behavioural development the leader has demonstrated
• The assumption that a leader has already done heaps of other traditional training courses
• The organisation wanting to demonstrate the value (financial and other) it places on this leader
• That the return of investment will be greater when with leaders due to their position of power in the organisation
• The status that comes with executive coaching

But, surely, like with most traditions and habits, that’s what they are, habits, and assumptions. How do we, as leaders and HR/L&D professionals start changing our own mind-sets and start thinking that all employees should benefit from coaching, and that we need all our human resource to flourish in order to gain 'returns'?

The future of coaching

In his YouTube film Change Squared, Futurist Gerd Leonhard, talks of the vital importance of tapping into human only skills where digital transformation is gaining ever more momentum. More and more of our tasks will be replaced by machines, automation, processes etc. but our human skills, those brought about by emotion, empathy, understanding, rationalisation, love, creativity, leadership, passion, are irreplaceable.

So, if we’re in an organisation that understands this, that all human resources are valuable to the organisations success, we need to think deeply about our approaches to fairness when it comes to development opportunities.

Let’s also look at this with a diversity lens. If we’re just offering bespoke, deep, behavioural, potentially more expensive learning opportunities to leaders, where most leaders are white or male, or both, what does that mean for those who aren’t white or male in terms of their value to the organisation? Would people of colour or women feel less valued in organisations having not been offered the same opportunities as their fellow colleagues?

We can also look at age in this context; gone are the days where employees want structured appraisals, formal learning or online toolkits; millennials and iGeneration employees want feedback in the moment, bespoke learning opportunities, an opportunity to explore their own career journey, have autonomy and be trusted to develop in a non-formal context; essentially, they enjoy talking, writing, blogging, instagramming and tweeting…and usually about themselves, their experiences, opinions and what they know! And this breeds creativity and business development, it can build relationships, confidence and ultimately, it works for them. So organisations will need to adapt to these generations or risk losing this talent.

The future of coaching is exciting but it shouldn’t just stop with leadership or executive coaching. Some organisations, such as Google, have built coaching into their culture, whereby nearly everyone is a practiced coach. We can learn a lot from these organisations and the successes they have in keeping current, inventive, forward thinking and overall successful.

What’s bigger than that though is what this approach can offer for our marginalised employees and how they see themselves in society. We shouldn’t be wasting this incredible and diverse talent, instead, we need to be tapping into this talent and helping our employees to flourish!

*Sincerely X, Episode 5: Equality Executive