EXECUTIVE COACHING

According to Fortune, Feb 21, 2000: "Corporate coaching is one of the stranger wrinkles in management these days--one of the hottest things in human resources, except that it doesn't usually come out of human resources. (In fact, HR is often the last to know.) It is a grassroots movement that is spreading in some of the unlikeliest corners of corporate America, including IBM, AT&T, and Kodak.

"Coaches are everywhere these days. Companies hire them to shore up executives or, in some cases, to ship them out. Division heads hire them as change agents. Workers at all levels of the corporate ladder, fed up with a lack of advice from inside the company, are taking matters into their own hands and enlisting coaches for guidance on how to improve their performance, boost their profits, and make better decisions about everything from personnel to strategy.

"It's not that executive coaching is particularly new. Chief executives and those approaching the top have long sought counsel from personal consultants, wise board members, or industrial psychologists. But in the past five years coaching has gone mass-market. In the age of Every Man for Himself, every man can have a coach - and, in an ever more commonly held view, needs one."

How leaders learn

Fast Company, Dec. 19, 2005 – According to Jim Bolt, Chairman of Executive Development Associates, his company conducted a survey in 2005 of trends in executive and leadership development with 100 chief learning officers and heads of development departments from leading companies around the world. They were asked what learning methods they would use most over the next 2-3 years. The top five answers were:
1. Use of our own senior executives as faculty - 75%
2. Action Learning (working in teams on business problems/opportunities) - 73%
3. Use of outsides speakers or outside experts as faculty - 66%
4. Use of external executive coaches - 56%
5. Use of internal executive/leadership development staff or experts as faculty - 52% 

The use of senior executives as faculty for developing leaders topped the list for the first time in the 21-year history of the survey. Three-fourths of the companies say they will use their top executives to teach, not just show up for the kick-off or closing ceremonies. Closely following this method is Action Learning – working in teams on current problems or opportunities; both to address real business challenges and to develop the participants simultaneously.

The other significant finding is the high ranking of executive coaching – the first time this sometimes controversial learning method has cracked the top five. It appears that after recent years of both hype and sniping on the benefits of executive coaching, it has gained favor. With executives increasingly under the gun to move quickly and make complex decisions, it makes sense that companies would want a coach to walk managers through challenging situations with a potentially big payoff from the performance improvement that can be gained.The folks who thought that coaching was a fad that would quietly fade away may have to rethink their position.

Appropriately, there seems to be a low tolerance for theoretical learning and a high attraction to learning that is action-oriented and embedded in real work. If you are not taking advantage of these methods in your leadership development efforts, you might want to take a closer look. See entire article

What can I expect from executive coaching?

Coaching creates an environment where it is safe to question, to appear vulnerable, to observe, to explore, experiment, to learn and change. That allows the executive to work with a coach in a variety of ways:

• To produce extraordinary results in your career or organization
• To stretch and set higher goals
• Learning to coach your team to work together more effectively so they accomplish more than they thought they could
• For business visioning and planning
• To become extremely productive
• To create a better balance between professional and personal life
• To turn around a difficult situation
• To handle business or personal problems

Coaching boosts return on investment

In a study of coaching by Michigan firm Triad Performance Technologies supporting 67 regional and district telecom sales managers, it was estimated that a $2 million increase in profits followed coaching. The company reported ROI in the 10 to 1 range. Changes included:

• Focusing on strategic account development, which increased sales
• Improved results from managers who had not met previous objectives
• Enhanced customer satisfaction and increased revenues
• Retention of top-performing staff

In its May 2002 issue, Fortune described ROI of an intensive coaching program for part of the retail sales force of Metropolitan Life Financial Services. The program cost about $620,000 and delivered $3.2 million in measurable gains. Another important gain was retention of all the sales people who were coached. Industry statistics show that it costs $140,000 to replace a sales person with three years of experience.

The only way to truly understand what coaching is all about is to experience it for yourself. Call Jack to schedule a free sample coaching session.

» Contact Jack Pyle for information.

Face to Face Matters, Inc. 1560 Little Lake Drive #16 Ann Arbor, MI 48103 517-243-3223