Performance Coaching

By John Fielder and Malcolm Arin-Strutt

The Changing Workplace

Organisational changes within the global workplace over the last 10 years have presented the most profound challenge since the initial impetus of the industrial revolution. In order to survive organisations must innovate, change and evolve to anticipate or match the evolutions within the marketplaces in which they trade. This evolution is driven by people who in themselves need to be on that evolutionary spiral of development. As a company needs to gain a competitive edge, be at the forefront of the technology revolution and be able to optimise profitability within their existing and emerging marketplaces, so must individuals be innovative, technically adept, energised and able to integrate with team members to produce a synergistic advantage. The way that many individuals and organisations are meeting these challenges is with the help of a personal coach (sometimes called a performance coach, executive mentor or life coach).

The coaching approach normally involves the individual and coach agreeing a set of developmental and behavioural objectives and with the benefit of the coach’s experience and competence they build strategy and practices around the individual’s particular strengths and preferences, which cannot so easily be achieved with other approaches. Coaching allows personal flexibility, confidential feedback and opportunities to address real, current issues. It challenges the individual to evaluate progress face-to-face with someone who wants to see him or her succeed and to improve upon what has been done. This is what makes it evolutionary: building on past and existing capabilities while reaching for what is beyond current beliefs.

Coaching in the current organisational climate

Coaching is not new, but what it has now developed into is different and more specialised. The knowledge, skills, personal qualities and experience needed to be a competent coach are now much broader and demanding and stretch into personal as well as professional areas of life (e.g. managing interpersonal conflicts and relationship building). Whilst previously, training events were the main means of developing staff, in the current climate of constant change and uncertainty, this is not always the best strategy. Whilst, training is still important to acquire skills, or to communicate relevant knowledge to staff, coaching is a more suitable way of transforming skills into competence. In addition, there are issues of personal understanding, confidence building and motivation, in which more direct, investigative methods are often necessary. To address individual doubts and limitations, counselling has also to be a skill in the coach’s portfolio of competences. To be able to challenge the individual to "dare to go further" and also to show how to draw upon potential resources by "facing the fear", the coach needs both to inspire and to support the individual, so that a realistic action plan with suitable benchmarks for monitoring success and learning from shortcomings is established.

One way of combining personal and professional needs is to have a day of training followed
by a series of one-to-one coaching sessions, in which the individual has a personal development plan (PDP) linked to the organisation’s goal and targets. This method can more directly integrate individual, team and organisational development. As well as offering an objective analytical appraisal when objectives are not achieved, the coach is able to give encouragement and praise when success is achieved (surveys by the writers have shown that a lack of recognition from senior management is a major cause of demotivation in the workforce of many British companies). The relationship between coach and individual is therefore crucially important to obtain the best results.

In summary, though professional development can be implemented through mentoring, training, coaching or counselling, in the current climate of development, the coach is expected to perform all of these functions: to be able to address strategic issues and operational problems; to be able to converse comfortably with all levels of staff and gain their confidence; to be able to train by demonstrable means; to have the psychological background to counsel and understand an individual from his/her perspective and to be able to address areas of health and life-style from an informed viewpoint.

Performance Improvement

In organisational terms, improving performance can mean increasing technical, managerial, organisational or business competence. For the individual, performance improvement can mean increasing knowledge or skills; developing natural abilities or refining personal qualities, but ultimately the personal effort involved creates a higher level of competence and a positive attitude to environmental opportunities and responsibilities.

The more senior the manager, the more specialist skills and personal support he or she is likely to require. As well as functional and technical competence a director needs skills such as: asking powerful questions; listening not only to what people say, but what they mean; exploring new organisational structures and strategies, assessing the interactions of team members with strong and differing personalities; how to influence major decisions at board level. The coach facilitates and aids development of these skills and can add support and confidence to a director’s style, help stimulate new ideas, or reflect back to the director the possible reactions from others of implementing certain decisions being considered. Naturally such discourse would be difficult between a senior manager and a coach from within the organisation. This is why executive coaches are mostly external consultants, in order to be able to offer objective analysis and subjective support, without bias towards the desired outcome and without operational ramifications or contextual limitations.

For the best synergistic results, the individual manager must own the development and make the organisation a learning ground. In turn, the organisation will need to see and feel the benefits of the coaching programme. However, performance improvement is not just about increasing profits, individuals must feel added purpose and meaning in what they are doing. People also have a life outside of the organisation and the need for leisure time and good relationships must also be considered as part of the coaching process for overall performance improvement. This is why some coaches call themselves "Life Coaches", seeking not only to improve individual performance to benefit the organisation, but also add quality to life for the sake of the individual.

What the coaching process involves

Imagine the following scenarios:

You are leading a project involving a number of specialists who would all like to be leading the project (i.e. politicking is rife). You have to integrate this team and motivate them; to draw out their ideas, develop a strategic plan and a make decisions that enable you and the team to achieve its objective. Because the team members are specialists your contribution is to understand their technical language and organise the group, picking out individual strengths and dealing with the mixture of personalities, one of which is your own personality.

or

In your organisation some people have complained about the bullying style of one of the managers. Although performing well, is enthusiastic and is achieving targets the manager is not getting on so well with some members of the organisation and this is demotivating them.

or

You are becoming anxious from the increasing demands placed upon you in the time available. There seems to be no time to stand back and review how best to deal with the growing number of problems. Also, the family at home are complaining they never see you and you need to feel more in control of your life.

All of the above scenarios are real situations encountered by the writers as coaches and where the help of a personal coach transformed the situation. The methods employed in coaching such instances may vary amongst coaches, but there would inevitably be an initial session of defining the real problem and identifying the major needs. In the first session trust and a rapport needs to be built up between the manager and the coach so that both feel confident that they can work together to solve the problem or resolve the issue. Once clarification has taken place and the required outcomes have been stated, the process of understanding the technical and personal aspects take place. This may mean a few or several ongoing sessions involving brainstorming techniques, psychometric assessments (personality, competencies etc), discussing a possible strategic plan or using behavioural techniques such as NLP to change an outdated belief pattern.

Although methods of coaching vary amongst practitioners, a common feature is goal setting.

A list of goals that can be pursued by a coach and his/her client are given by Richard Kilburg (1996). These are as follows.

1. Increase the range, flexibility, and effectiveness of their client’s behavioural repertoire.
2. Increase the client’s capacity to manage an organisation - planning, organising, staffing, leading, controlling, cognitive complexity, decision making, jobs, roles, etc.
3. Improve client psychological and social competencies, e.g.
a. increase psychological and social awareness and understanding,
b. increase tolerance and range of emotional responses,
c. increase flexibility in and ability to develop and maintain effective interpersonal relationships within the diverse workforce.
4. Improve the client’s ability to manage the tensions between organisation, family, community, industry and personal needs and demands.
5. Improve the effectiveness of the organisational team.

Coaching Tools

To enable the above goals to be achieved, a number of tools are used by coaches to address the many dimensions of human performance. These include:

There are many more business models in addition to the above models that the coach may need to be aware of (e.g. IT strategies and e-commerce methods in the course of his or her profession). The coach is therefore a person who is committed to continuous professional development to keep pace with current individual and organisational needs.

The Development of a coach and coaching in the future
If each member of a management team can improve performance by just 1% through coaching, imagine what multiple effect this could have on the overall result of the team output and the organisation’s "bottom line". Similarly, for the individual, achieving goals in both professional and personal life can uplift his or her esteem and quality of life unmeasureably.

These are the challenges for a coach: to be able to confidently achieve positive changes in an individual’s performance and personal life. Therefore, training to be a coach requires more than a set of skills. The coach needs to gain a broad academic knowledge base of business and management, possibly through a degree course. There also needs to be a richness of experience across a wide range of life challenges, possibly from a number of corporate and cultural environments, role responsibilities, foreign travel and dealing with relationship problems. There should be access to a variety of human behavioural management techniques with suitable user qualifications or practitioner status. To be able to address personal problems, there needs to be a sound grounding in human psychology and a record of managing change both internally and externally. With the current emphasis on financial success there also needs to be an awareness of financial investment and commercial acumen.

The above criteria are by no means over-the-top, and the present day competent coach often offers more by way of personal success and professional qualifications. Inevitably the professional coach is mature in years in comparison to the competent manager who may have risen up the corporate ladder substantially by the age of 30 years, but has not yet had the life experience to become a professional coach. As Andrew Ferguson (1999) states in so many words. "Age gives one the ability to anticipate and this is one of the principal ways in which change is managed without stress".

The coach of the future will no doubt have to have the maturity, competence and professionalism to deal with ever increasing uncertainty and change. There will also be the need to be able to utilise the technology of the time. This could mean coaching by visual telephone, using Internet sites to administer psychometric questionnaires, involving the use of Internet chat rooms, interactive computer programmes and virtual learning centres.

With the changing work patterns, where terms of employment become shorter, less defined and varied, where a career is one of several over an extending lifetime and where the quick accumulation of wealth can offer the freedom to choose in the future whatever activity is preferred, there is an increasing need for each person to find a purpose in what they do, in order to progress their life. This purpose may change over time, but whatever one does, it is a human characteristic to want to add meaning and value to life, and to build external lifestyles that reflect internal beliefs. Perhaps this is because what we value most usually promotes happiness, wealth, power, love, success or other goal.

To quote
"People achieve happiness when they have eliminated inner conflict between their achievements and aspirations". (Martyn Fletcher)

In these terms the role of the coach might be defined as: enabling individuals to achieve their aspirations, eliminate internal conflict and find happiness – a worthy but by no means easy task!

© John Fielder and Malcolm Arin-Strutt.

This article was posted by John Fielder

View all articles posted by John Fielder

http://www.thecoaches.co.uk

 - Printer-friendly version

Comments

No comments have been posted here yet.

Please login to post a new comment

Sponsored Links