Casting a Critical Eye on Coaching

AMA Enterprise research found that coaching is usually kept secret at as many as two-thirds of organizations and sometimes secret at one-quarter. Companies should undertake coaching engagements with tact, transparency and an eye toward assuring talent that the process will be beneficial to career progress and drive performance. “An effective leader who has benefited from coaching will drive the engagement of other leaders and employees throughout the firm. And that only lends itself to positive bottom-line improvement,” Garger said.

Brian Underhill, CEO and founder of CoachSource, agreed that coaching engagements work best when the culture is favorable toward developing, improving and getting better. “Leaders are open to accepting feedback and having honest conversations, and there is a strong level of trust amongst the top executives,” he said. “This sets the overall tone for the whole organization.”

Watch for Derailers
Despite its wide use in corporate America, coaching gets mixed grades on performance. Just one-quarter of organizations that provide coaching have found it very effective and nearly two-thirds regard it as only somewhat effective, according to AMA Enterprise’s research. Further, 12 percent consider it ineffective.

According to Sass, coaching interventions cannot be effective when the leader is not serious and committed to the initiative. “What we tend to receive in these scenarios is lip service where the executive does not follow up on planned actions and meetings are frequently canceled and moved around. The individual leader really has to feel the need for the coaching to be personally engaged.”

Mixed grades for coaching are not dissimilar to those for other forms of executive and leadership development, however. So a critical assessment of coaching should not be a cause for alarm, but a reminder that measurement and accountability may never be taken for granted. “We implement a 360 assessment at the start of the engagement so we have a benchmark,” Sass said. “Then about six months later we administer a similar assessment so we can gauge if we are moving the meter in the right direction with the executive and for the right behaviors. We use this to determine that the individual is learning and applying behavioral change and whether or not this change is positively impacting the business.”