Coaching for success

A global study, The Coaching Conundrum, revealed that in Asia, 49% of employees receive coaching from their current managers and 69% of that group indicated that their job performance has improved. Results also showed that 88% of managers (respondents) across the globe believed that the time spent coaching their team members has helped to achieve their goals.

This is just one of the numerous studies conducted on the topic and experts say that business and executive coaching helps organisations maximise the skills of employees and their leaders in order to achieve set business goals.

However, experts and employers alike state that in order for organisations to make coaching part of their workplace practice, management and HR should have clear goals and ensure that they communicate them to employees.

Coaching maximises potential

Chee Nian Tze, general manager, Group Human Resources at Robinsons Group of Companies, says that coaching is part of the organisation’s learning and development and it is also a “tool we use in developing high performance culture.”

Robinsons Group of Companies offers coaching for its teams as well as its leaders. Chee states that the company started providing coaching for teams a few years ago in order to “help them set and achieve desired outcomes on team projects”. This team coaching is generally goals-specific where the team is given a project and then is coached to deliver it.

Also, it introduced executive coaching for leadership development two years ago. Executive leadership coaching comprises of “coaching for both personal growth and achieving professional goals,” Chee adds.

Similarly, another organisation that has used coaching successfully for years is Sony. Virendra Shelar, Head of Recruitment & Talent Development (AMEA), Sony Electronics Asia Pacific, states that coaching has been part of Sony culture for a long time and the organisation has engaged coaches at various levels “depending on the professional and personal development needs.”

Besides utilising external business coaches, Sony is interested in developing coaches internally.

It is currently developing a leadership development programme in which coaching will be an integral part of the programme, Shelar explains. Managers will be trained in coaching techniques and will learn how to use them in order to effectively lead their teams.

This programme will help train Sony managers and involve them in coaching their subordinates, Shelar adds. The senior managers will coach mid-level managers, who will in turn coach the junior managers. Junior managers may also be involved in coaching new hires. For executive coaching, managers will have a minimum of one hour of interaction per month for one year with their coaches.

Both organisations have seen positive results by engaging coaches as well as adopting a coaching culture. Chee says that the organisation has seen improvements, especially in the area of executive coaching for leadership development. “The senior business leaders tend to be busy and time is a luxury. Coaching allows them to acquire leadership and personal development in a more time-efficient manner.” Moreover, she says that teams that have been coached are more committed in their deliverables.

Sony has received positive feedback from employees through performance appraisals as well as through discussions between the coach and coachee. Also, the organisation finds that coaching has been especially useful for employees who have transferred to another country. It helps them “to understand the new culture and helps them perform better in a new work environment,” Shelar adds.

Promoting coaching in organisations

Experts and employers alike highlight that HR and management have a key role to play when it comes to encouraging a coaching culture in the workplace – from adopting a proper framework to specifying specific goals and communicating them to key stakeholders. Employers also state that HR and managers need to have a good understanding of how coaching can help their organisations.

Shelar emphasises that “coaching needs to be part of the system rather than a one-off activity. It will also need commitment from both the coach and coachee to make the programme a success” and in order to do so, organisations need to create the right environment. HR needs to put in place specific processes in the organisation and then help govern it.

Communicating to key stakeholders about coaching and involving senior managers as coaches will help to lead by example, he notes. Chee affirms this, saying that HR and managers should inform those who are being coached “on the desirable outcome of coaching and how different this will be compared with the usual way of doing things.”

However, experts and employers state that managers should understand the several dos and don’ts when it comes to coaching in order to make it successful. The Coaching Conundrum research paper highlighted that coaching should not be confused by managers as a performance feedback and it is not “something you do to employees”. A majority of respondents in the survey revealed that they preferred that managers let them think through issues and solve them on their own.

Shelar notes: “Coaching is about helping employees improve their performance by defining their own plan of action.”

The road ahead

Employers say that adopting a coaching culture takes time and it comes with its own set of challenges, which might prevent organisations from adopting it in the first place. Chee explains that in the case of executive coaching, “it is more sensitive as the person who is being coached may feel uncomfortable sharing his or her inner thoughts with an unfamiliar person,” she says.

However, she says that the Robinsons Group did not have major problems in adopting coaching as HR spent time communicating to employees and managers about the benefits of coaching before the programmes were started.

Shelar says that Sony could anticipate some challenges such as “view towards coaching, competence of our managers and the governance process.” However, he concludes that a third party unbiased view would help employees, and that managers will help them see the big picture.