Jay Wolf is the president of JWC, a people strategy firm. He has been an organizational, executive and performance coach for over 15 years.
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In the last 15 years, the discipline of coaching has grown into an estimated $2.8 billion-dollar industry, with an estimated 71,000 coaches worldwide. Organizations all over the world are using coaching as a way to attract, retain and develop top talent attempting to gain an advantage in today’s ultra-competitive business environment. Companies are using coaching to sharpen the skills of individuals who have been identified as high potentials and future organizational leaders.
It is widely accepted by many CEOs and management development specialists that few leadership development and performance interventions have the potential of coaching. So, after 15 years, why has employee engagement fluctuated between 26% and 34%? At those numbers, organizations are trying to achieve their goals and be successful with almost two-thirds of their workforce actively disengaged. I’m not saying that coaching is the only reason for these engagement numbers, but I do feel that coaching has been misused to a great extent and is at least part of the problem.
So, what is coaching? Coaching, in the theoretical sense, is a process used to facilitate others to discover the best way to successfully accomplish a goal. It is a collaborative process that empowers people to realize their potential through building awareness, responsibility and action toward positive, lasting change. Coaching is taught to be more about asking the right questions than providing answers. A coach engages in a collaborative alliance with an individual to establish and clarify goals and then creates a plan of action to achieve those goals. Traditional coaching is all about self-directed learning. “Give someone a fish and they eat for a day; teach them to fish, and they eat for a lifetime.”
Coaching is a tremendous discipline that has the potential to help people become high performers. It can be exactly what organizations are looking for in their leadership and high potentials. As great as the potential of coaching is, years of experience have shown the predominant traditional model of coaching being used does not work in the high-stakes, fast-paced, time-sensitive world of international business. Coaching, all too often, is used as a rescue model. When an organization has an employee who is underperforming and termination is the likely next step, a coach is brought in to try to rescue the employee as a last step.
This is not what coaching was designed for. Coaching is a health model. It should be used when an organization has a high-performing employee who is about to move up in the organization and needs some coaching to help them take that next step. Left to figure things out for themselves, employees feel frustrated and stuck more often than not. Constantly having to deal with deadlines, improved performance and results, many employees have welcomed the idea of coaching but desire a different coaching model.
In my work, I have developed such a model and have been using it for over 15 years with great success. It is the only coaching model that has registration status with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The Power Coaching Model® is a hybrid style of coaching using the principles of coaching and consulting in order to facilitate positive action and peak performance. It maintains a coach must have expertise in the area in which they are coaching. This allows the coach to take a more assertive and direct approach. A Power Coach always stays true to the fundamental principle of not giving answers, but because of their expertise, has the freedom to offer alternative ways of thinking in order to help the employee reach their goal in the shortest amount of time.
Based on the cognitive foundation of thoughts drive emotions, emotions drive behaviors and behaviors drive results, a Power Coach will stretch an employee out of their comfort zone by challenging them to think differently. Most coaching being done today makes the mistake of coaching around observable behavior. This often proves to be too late in the process to achieve any sustainable behavior change. If coaching is being done to increase performance, a coach, in most situations, will have to introduce or help change the way an employee thinks about setting goals. Setting goals is the foundation of any successful coaching engagement. It is also the only way an organization can measure the progress of the person being coached.
Traditional coaching is usually delivered during a six-month engagement where the coach and coachee meet offline every other week for about an hour. The coaching style I recommend is delivered over nine months and is broken up into three stages. The first stage is traditional offline coaching, where the coaching aims to build trust between the coach and coachee. Stage two is observational coaching, where the coach will observe the coachee and then take the session offline and coach around what they observed. The third and final stage is live-action coaching, where the coach will deliver feedback in real-time for optimal behavior change.
Coaching can be a very effective tool in increasing the performance of people, if you do your due diligence and find the right coach using the right coaching model. Too many coaching organizations make the promise of delivering unrealistic returns on investment (ROIs). The truth of the matter is there is no such thing as a hard ROI when it comes to the improvement of soft skills. You either believe in the process of performance development of your people or you don’t. The coaching process is a long-term investment in the development of an organization’s most important asset — its human capital.
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