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COACHING E-ZINE - ISSUE NO.40/ NOVEMBER 2010

Dear Reader,

Being one of the pioneers of coaching in Hong Kong and China, I'm often asked questions like this: "Charlie, is it still worth to become a professional coach? Seems there are already too many around."

To which I tend to reply: "My estimation is that the number of professionally trained coaches reached around 200 in Hong Kong - an increase of about 1,000% since 2002 when I started to work as an executive coach. While that seems a lot, it's actually not that much, considering that there are about70- 80 times as many coaches in Germany, a country with about 12 times the population of Hong Kong."

Besides, the question if someone should still become an engineer, doctor, teacher, conductor, lawyer, etc. is rarely asked even though there are lots of them around, certainly much more than coaches.

At the same time, I would caution to believe that attending a 3-day coach training program plus some teleclasses make you a professional coach and that because of growing demand, clients will knock down your door. Not happening. Or to believe just because some coach training schools offer their participants after completion of x modules of their training, to get on their 'panel' that it means automatically you'll recover your investment quickly - not happening either. At least I have yet to meet a coach who could report such a success story - and I meet many coaches here. The stories I hear rather go like this: "I've completed two modules of XYZ school. I joined their program because they promised me to be on their panel afterwards and that there is lots of demand for coaching. Now, a year later, I haven't even received a single phone call, forget about getting any assignment."

Like for any other profession, there are hardly any miraculous ways to achieve success: get proper training (3 days is a start but WON'T do the job), get as much practice as possible, if necessary probono, and get a feedback system in place to ensure you're on track. Practice doesn't necessarily make perfect, practice without qualified feedback may make you perfectly wrong. Once you gain proficiency which happens only through continuous practice and learning, you'll gain confidence and credibiity and chances of getting coaching assignments continuously increase. There is no shortcut I know of, sorry.

Want to know more? Join our sessions on 29/Nov in Singapore or 10/Dec in Hong Kong.

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Progress Expert and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor
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Why being a coach to your direct reports hardly works

By Charlie Lang

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It's dawning on you that your corporate culture should shift towards a coaching culture. As a result, you realize you and other leaders should learn at least basic coaching skills. Or you simply realize that a leader who doesn't learn how to coach soon will be the equivalent of a manager who refuses to use emails - a relic of the past.

So, why would I make such an outrageous statement that leaders can hardly be coaches to their subordinates? Especially since you might know that coach training for leaders is our most popular program?

Bear with me, the mystery shall be resolved.

As often is the case, the solution lies in a subtle albeit critical distinction. Let's first look at some of the essentials of what makes coaching effective.

The Coaching Mindset

The perhaps most important element of the coaching mindset is the concept of giving maximum ownership to the coachee. In principle, that means that the coachee is responsible for the coaching agenda as well as for discovering options for possible actions, for choosing the most optimal one(s) and for carrying out the action items after any coaching session.

The role of the coach is to facilitate the thinking and discovery process of the coachee without giving advice. Instead, the coach can share his own ideas or experiences but keep the coachee accountable to move forward accordingly. All throughout, the coach needs to be as non-judgmental as possible to avoid steering the coachee with any biases the coach may have.

Perhaps you start to sense the problem...

Let's look at an example taken from the real life of a sales manager called Alice. She wants to act as a coach to Tim, one of her sales executives. Alice opens the coaching session with "Tim, what would you like to get out of today's session?" Tim responds, "I'd like to discuss my future career prospects. You know, I’ve been in this role for two years and my results are pretty good, having been almost on target in the first year and now, two months before year-end, I already exceeded this year’s target by 10%. I think in the next 6-12 months, I should be able to get promoted to sales manager level.”

Alice is shocked to hear this. Even though Tim is what we would consider a high-potential, and certainly, in a few years time, it would be reasonable to consider his promotion to sales manager. Right now, however, this is out of question for her for a number of reasons, the most important being that Alice invested quite some time to get Tim up to speed. Now that he’s really productive, she wants to reap the fruits of her efforts rather than promote him right away.

You see, Alice is now in a difficult situation as her own ambitions and needs clash with the ambitions of Tim. To remain 100% in coaching mode will be extremely difficult for her as she would be required to totally detach from her own needs in order to remain non-judgmental and focused 100% on the coachee’s optimal outcome which is detrimental to her own optimal outcome.

You may say, ok, in this case it’ll be difficult to remain in coaching mode, but that such cases are not the norm. Well, yes, they are not the norm. However, in my experience, I’ve seen that such situations can happen quite easily in the relationship between a manager and a direct report.

So does it mean that managers should forget about coaching?

Not so fast. We would like to distinguish between ‘being a coach as manager’ and ‘using coaching as a leadership style’. There are indeed many situations where coaching principles and skills can be applied in leadership situations without the risk of running into problems as described above and where coaching achieves clearly superior results compared to a more traditional leadership style.

What we found to be really difficult is for a manager to take the role of an actual coach to direct reports in the same way a professional internal or external coach would. The chance of conflict of interest is simply too high. For an internal coach (who is not the direct superior) or an external coach, this conflict of interest usually does not exist and as such they can play the role of the unbiased coach without the described challenges.

Learning coaching principles, skills, and processes is highly recommended for leaders to add an important element to their leadership repertoire. Using coaching as a leadership style, where appropriate, makes leaders more effective. Moreover, with the cultural shifts brought along by the Knowledge Worker Age, it’ll soon become a standard competency required of leaders.

Being a coach to your direct reports is a potentially tricky undertaking and could quickly lead to major conflicts of interest. We recommend that approach at best only to professionally trained coaches, knowing that that it is very challenging even for them.

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