Not Everyone's a Masterful Coach
The work of effective coaching within organizations involves unleashing the human spirit and expanding people's capacity to stretch and grow beyond self-limiting boundaries. Coaching should not start with goal setting and problem solving, but rather with exploring the underlying concepts or mental models that a person uses to make meaning. What are the assumptions and beliefs that determine behavior? The truly effective coach knows that you can't solve a problem before you know what the problem really is.

This is a primary difference between coaching, as it is set forth here as an independent set of skills, and consulting. The consultant is usually called to provide answers. The consultant doing coaching may or may not be skilled at distinguishing this important difference.

Before they can focus on performance issues, a masterful coach guides the exploration process, identifying openings where there may be blind spots. He or she helps to clarify what really matters to the person being coached. Together, they look towards alignment of personal and organizational goals. Only then can there be commitment to right action within the context of the organizational culture and business reality.

It becomes evident that this exploration of assumptions and beliefs is difficult to do when the person coaching is a peer or a supervisor within the organization.

Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee in their latest book Primal Leadership (Harvard Business School Press 2002) bring up the point that despite the commonly held belief that every leader needs to be a good coach, they exhibit this style least often. In high-pressure times, leaders say they "don't have the time" for coaching. Although coaching focuses on personal development rather than on accomplishing tasks, this leadership style generally predicts an outstandingly positive emotional response and better results.

The Critical Need for Impact Studies
What is not always clear in organizations is how initiatives of any sort dealing with intangible effects can impact the bottom line. Some examples of the ways that coaching programs affect financial results are provided in this article.

One study conducted by MetrixGlobal for an executive coaching program designed by The Pyramid Resource Group (www.pyramidresource.com) was impressive. Pyramid coached over 70 executives from a multi-national telecommunications company that included participants in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. MetrixGlobal performed an extensive survey of 43 coaching participants that yielded the following results:

Coaching produced a 529% return on investment and significant intangible benefits to the business. Including the financial benefits from employee retention, coaching boosted the overall ROI to 788%. The study provided powerful new insights into how to maximize the business impact from executive coaching.(Merrill Anderson: merrilland@metrixglobal.net)

It remains critical to reiterate the need for coaching to demonstrate the impact on the bottom line. Money is acknowledged as an indicator of value in the marketplace. Peter Drucker often refers to profit as the return on invested capital. We must always evaluate the return to our human and financial capital in light of profitability. It is critical to establish measurements before coaching programs are implemented in order to account for the change induced by coaching. Few organizations or consultants take the time to do this.

To be successful in today's ever-shifting market, people count for more ‚ they can make or break the best business strategy, be the driver or brake in adopting new technologies. People are not an implementation issue, nor just an operational or strategic asset. People are the raw resource around which business success revolves. No strategy, however well designed, will work unless you have the right people, with the right skills and behaviors, in the right roles, motivated in the right way and supported by the right leaders. Adopting new technologies without having the right people to use them wastes billions of dollars of investment by companies throughout the world. ‚The Hay Group