Leadership Management Training - Modern coaching takes centre stage

Senior executives are jumping on the bandwagon to add to their managerial skills or as part of an MBA, writes Roger Eglin.

There is a fresh buzzword sweeping the corridors of management education: coaching. If you have not got on this bandwagon, you are missing out.

Coaching is not new, but it is changing shape and growing fast. Two or three years ago it was mainly a remedial business, a helping hand for the manager who was not quite making it. Now it is something the high-flyer cannot afford to be without.

As demand grows, business schools are pulling together courses and striving to keep up as the candidates queue up. Combine coaching with some leadership training and it makes for a powerful cocktail.

Patricia Bossons, director of coaching services at Henley Management College, said “A couple of years ago there was no coaching services to be director of. Now there’s huge interest.

“There are senior practising managers from usually blue-chip companies and freelance consultants who have taken on big coaching workloads. Many often have business-school affiliations. There are issues about standards, regulation and quality and a lot of jostling for pole position. It’s definitely the flavour of the month.”

Last year Henley had three coaching training programmes scheduled. But as demand grew, it had to hold six. This year the momentum shows no signs of slackening. “People turn up for courses as themselves and leave their status behind them. There are several doctoral students doing PhDs on coaching. It is regarded as a way of freeing up someone’s personal resources,” said Bossons.

Many would-be coachers see it as a form of personal renewal. Retired ambassadors, former wing commanders and human-resources directors have all joined the rush as well as others looking to escape the grip of a large company employer.

At this relatively early stage, coaches are just beginning to establish themselves as senior practitioners. Jane Turner is programme director for the postgraduate certificate in coaching at Newcastle Business School. She cut her teeth coaching with the mobile-phone giant Orange and in the motor industry, and has just completed her first year in the academic world. One of her latest projects is coaching senior managers at Newcastle police.

Next year the Newcastle team will be moving to new premises and offering a senior management programme. Coaching will form an important part of this. Experience has shown the benefits of coaching senior executives. “Coaching acts as a catalyst,” said Turner. “It helps to embed the knowledge acquired on the management course and people can take it back to their organisations more easily.”

Most companies are looking for guidance, particularly when it comes to defining the boundaries between coaching and counselling. Newcastle helps clients draw up those boundaries. “There are many possible frameworks,” said Turner. “They want us to supply one they can use. However, we say we will help you rather than supply a specific programme.”

Getting advice is important in a business that is still developing, said Turner. “How qualified are the people setting up coaching events? It can have a profound impact and be pretty damaging if it’s not done right.”

Defining what coaching is forms part of one of the modules on the senior management course. “Employers have tried the traditional approach to management training and are expecting more for their staff,” said Turner.

The second module covers the psychological aspects of coaching while the third looks at specialist coaching tools and techniques.

At the University of Bath School of Management the MBA degree is being reshaped to embrace the discipline. Veronica Hope-Hailey, professor of strategy, said: “Coaching will become part of the curriculum. We have redesigned the MBA and it will be relaunched this autumn.”

The main theme of the new course will be Developing Your Management Competence, and students will combine this with coaching. “They will get the same experience of coaching as they would get in the workplace,” said Hope-Hailey.

The MBA was once perceived as a passport to success but this is no longer true, she added. “Life is much more complicated. An MBA is not enough on its own.”

Underpinning the new degree will be the idea of self-managed learning. To some extent this reflects a growing feeling that, with the decline of the jobs-for-life philosophy and the idea of the social contract between worker and employer, managers have to take some responsibility for their own learning.

“There will be a lot of reflection and self-awareness in the course,” said Hope-Hailey. Although the new MBA will be unique, she believes a number of business schools are planning changes to their MBA courses that will also incorporate coaching.

Oona Goldsworthy, chief executive of the Bristol Community Housing Federation, is a convert to coaching after enrolling on a leadership course at Lancaster University Management School.

The course is a new one, aimed at helping women to achieve more. Although some 70% of the managers in the housing sector are women, nothing like that number ever get into the senior jobs.

When she decided to take the course, Goldsworthy had treated the coaching aspects of it as something of an added extra. Now she reckons the coaching is very helpful. “At the end of the year, it will emerge as the best part of it.”

She relishes the investment in her development that the one-to-one coaching represents. But if the experts have got it right, the combination of coaching and management development should give her career an enviable boost.

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