Why So Many Executives Are Becoming Isolated

Traditionally, one of our largest clients ran its business from manuals. Staff who wanted to know how something should be done would be directed by a senior manager "to look in staff manual 108" for the answer. It was not a motivational style of management, and had become unsuitable for fast-changing modern business conditions.

So eight years ago, based on our recommendations they created what they called "The ultimate service provision" by merging all the information technology (IT) and back-office functions. Management broke with old habits and traditional training, and decided to improve the leadership skills of the senior managers through coaching.

The outcome has been a resounding success, producing far better results than conventional development training. The evident superiority of coaching explains why more companies are taking the same route and making it a priority.

The Growth Of Personal Coaching:

We believe that coaching’s rapid growth will continue. Forward thinking organisations are looking for alternative ways to lead and organise staff. The business world has experienced more upheaval in the past ten years than in the previous fifty: It’s no accident that this period of unprecedented change has witnessed a boom in executive coaching.

At the moment one of my senior consultants is coaching a top executive who insists on becoming involved in every detail of the business, causing frustration amongst his junior executives. "If he’s not in a meeting, he feels he’s not working", I was told. Time management and delegation courses had done nothing to cure his faults, which leave him no time for the sort of reflective thinking expected of a senior manager. Coaching, particularly by making him study his own diary and cutting down on the congestion in it, is already having an impact.

The signs are that the boom will continue. A recent survey that I read, which polled H. R. professionals from Europe, America, Australia and Asia found that 88% of the respondents were planning to make more use of professional coaching. A little more than half of the respondents had introduced the practice in the past 18 months.

Like our clients, 70% of those polled said that coaching has an edge over conventional development techniques and they would choose it to change the behaviour and performance of senior people.

Coaching versus Traditional Development Programmes:

People may learn a great deal on development courses, but when they return to the workplace they often have difficulty integrating what they have learnt into their day-to-day work. Quite often, what they may have learnt simply slips from their minds.

We believe that between 50% and 70% of an organisation’s climate, and hence its effectiveness, can be traced to management style. Effective leaders create a favourable working environment that boosts performance. This is where coaching comes into its own. Leadership is a set of skills, competences and attitudes that individuals can develop through practice and by reflecting on their own actions and the impact this can have on others.

Most leadership programmes are too general to provide opportunities for such intensive personalised work. Coaching, by contrast, enables individuals to gain insight into their own motives, interests and concerns. These link explicitly to the challenges they face in their leadership or management roles.

Coaching can also help executives acquire a greater awareness of their own leadership style. This is crucial if they are to develop the variety of styles needed to manage and lead in different situations. All too often leaders rely on a command-and-control style, which has a negative impact on all but a crisis. Coaching people on leadership styles produces positive results in most situations by creating a supportive environment in which employees feel empowered to give their best and find the solutions to problems".

Coaching Is Not Just A Remedial Solution:

Not unnaturally, some diehards still hold with an old-fashioned view that coaching can be used only for remedial purposes, but those organisations that have embraced the concept fully, have discarded that level of thinking. Their approach concentrates on leadership and personal development as part of building a high-performance organisation - they are committed to moving away from managing by a culture of process to managing as leaders.

Typically we find that our clients are not interested in adopting the style of coaching used by many companies to focus on simple issues – particularly how to get on with fellow team members. They choose us because they believe we offer a more challenging style that digs more deeply into behaviour and personality. This leaves executives with something more permanent that they can take away from the coaching sessions and use during the rest of their careers rather than just a one-off.

It is not always easy to convince executives that they should submit to a scrutiny of their personalities and behaviour, but in reality, those executives who balk at taking "the journey of self development" could soon find themselves isolated and lesser leaders than many of their contemporaries.

Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Farrington. All rights reserved

Jonathan Farrington is the Managing Partner of The jfa Group. To find out more about the author, read his latest articles or to subscribe to his newsletter for dedicated business professionals, visit: http://www.jonathanfarrington.com You can also now read Jonathan's highly informative and popular weekly blog at: http://www.thejfblogit.co.uk