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Coaching initiatives are now particularly vulnerable at a time of cutbacks and reorganisation. Yet coaching is a vital part of what an organisation needs when consolidating and is particularly important for those who remain in the organisation as it allows them to adjust quickly to new roles and conditions.
So, in a time of economic scarcity, how can HR professionals sustain, grow and harvest the return on coaching investment in their organisations?
Bath Consultancy Group has been working with public and private sector organisations to develop coaching strategy and practice. In the private sector this includes Unilever, HSBC, and Ernst and Young. In the public sector we have worked with the NHS, local and central government, as well as the Armed Forces.
Our engagement has been at global, institutional and regional levels, including those umbrella agencies who have a strategic role to develop best practice such as the NHS Institute and the West Midlands Local Government Association. With this range of client experience we have a unique vantage point to see the common challenges faced by those who have developed coaching initiatives (see right hand panel).
The challenge and what to do about it
Our experience suggests that whilst individual organisations may be excelling at one aspect of coaching strategy they rarely encompass all the elements that need to be in place if they are to maximise their return on investment.
Key areas to address
We've put together the following key challenges and examples of organisations that have put these successfully into practice.
- Embedding coaching within a specific and compelling service challenge which saves costs. For example, Yorkshire and Humberside NHS is focussing coaching on managers who are leading system wide changes. In Ernst & Young, the coaching strategy focused on increasing revenues and market share, and resulted in them being better placed to weather the recession than their competitors in the Big 4.
- Focus an intensive coaching investment on a geographical site, led by the top, and build in evaluation of the difference it makes. In Her Majesty's Prison Service, the Governors of two prisons, Bullingdon and Layhill are explicitly adopting a coaching style supported by action learning to solve problems and shift culture.
- Identify line manager champions, or those who could become champions and agree specific goals with them. Work out who is best positioned to influence the opinion leaders and be prepared to learn their language if you want them to own your coaching strategy.
- Coach your fast trackers so that the next generation of leaders improves their performance faster and when appointed to key roles are already carriers of the coaching culture you want. Many public and private sector leadership development and Aspiring Director programmes include coaching.
- Use transition coaching to accelerate the speed with which managers in new roles following re-organisation or merger become effective successful, as is being done in the Department of Work and Pensions and in the Pensions and Disability Carers service.
- Focus your coaching investment on top leaders who need to work effectively together. A good example is the North West Employers Organisation who set up paired coaching between Chief Executives of Local Authorities and PCT Chief Executives.
- Invest in the development of your internal coaches and supervisors through master classes and learning exchange gatherings with external coaches, as they do in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and to harvest organisation learning.
- Require people who want to receive coaching to prepare the business case as part of their application, which has to be signed off by the line manager, as is done by Unilever.
- Ensure that every coach is engaged in identifying the systemic patterns that inhibit or accelerate learning as they do in Unilever.
- Include in the contracting a person who is responsible for organisational learning and can seed the learning elsewhere, as implemented by HSBC and the BBC.
- Take responsibility as a commissioner to know when to move from individual coaching to team coaching in order to strategise together and reduce costs, as they have done at Wiltshire PCT.
- Show that you take the cost reduction agenda seriously by ensuring your training and supervision arrangements are cost efficient, even when people drop out unexpectedly. This has been successful in HMPS and the West Midlands Local Government Association. Bath Consultancy Group's work with the NHS Institute is enabling Strategic Health Authorities to develop internal coaching supervision capability which will result in significant savings.
- Insist on a skills transfer so you reduce your reliance on external consultants.
The need for coaching supervision
Increasingly, supervision of coaching is being used not just to ensure good practice by individual coaches but to help strengthen the coaching strategy so that it is seen to make a direct contribution towards the achievement of business goals. In the current climate, cost reduction should be at the heart of that strategy.
Bath Consultancy Group's research for the CIPD into coaching supervision identified a wheel of good practice which describes the industry standard:
If you would like to know more and explore how robust your coaching investment is, give Bath Consultancy Group a call (01225 520866). Look out for the new book on coaching strategy being written by Prof Peter Hawkins and coming out in 2011.
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