How does coaching work?

The case for coaching

I believe that coaching is the most effective tool for senior management development: better than off-the-job courses, better than books and videos – and better than just on-the-job experience, which is, frankly, where most managers learn most things, rather than through formal education.

Coaching allows you to get real-time input on actual current issues – whilst also allowing the space for reflection on the lessons from particular events and how you have handled them. Coaching ensures that these lessons from everyday business life are captured and internalised, for future use – rather than simply dissipated and lost as the next crisis looms up.

All too many managers find themselves having to switch to a new challenge before they have properly had time to consider what they should have learned from the last one! Can it really be counted as “experience”, if you learn nothing from it? As the saying goes, he who does not learn from the mistakes of history is doomed to repeat them…

In the particular domain of strategy, a discipline renowned on the one hand for rather complex conceptual frameworks and models, and on the other for a low hit-rate of successful practical implementation, coaching allows theory and practice to be considered alongside each other.

In a coaching session, you can work through a strategy model using your own real business situation, rather than an idealised case study as would be found in a textbook or on a course. Thus the very useful insights of the best strategy tools can be made immediately and practically obvious, in terms of a solution to your actual pressing business issue – and as well as solving today’s problem, you have also built a more general capability in strategic thinking.

Strategy and Stress

There is of course a lot more to being a good manager than understanding the analytical tools of strategy. So there is a lot more to “strategy coaching” than explaining such tools and frameworks. Strategic issues never emerge neatly and simply as intellectual puzzles to solve - at least, not outside the walls of Business Schools! I recognise that it is in the nature of strategic issues that dealing with them often presents as great a personal challenge as an intellectual one.

For one thing, strategic issues usually involve high-profile decisions which will have a profound impact on the future of the organisation and on the working lives and careers of hundreds or even thousands of people. No pressure then!

Strategic decisions invariably involve major change to the organisation and its current patterns of influence and behaviour – to which many people will be deeply attached and thus keen to fight. Strategic decisions are hardly ever taken without a considerable amount of organisational politics and much interpersonal disagreement and conflict.

What is therefore obvious – though hardly ever even mentioned in any conventional account of strategy – is that making strategic decisions is a highly stressful activity for the senior managers involved.

And of course this is where coaching comes into its own, certainly relative to off-the-job courses on strategy which must necessarily abstract from all this messy context. In a coaching session, I can help you think it all through together - which is after all how you are going to have to deal with it! In particular, I can support you in handling the personal stresses of dealing with strategic issues.

To support this aspect of my work, I have many years experience with the Centaur model of Leadership Development. This model has its roots in therapy but has been adapted for use with management populations. It posits 5 different personality types commonly found in the general management population. Each type has a characteristic set of attitudes, beliefs and perspectives, which combine to form a distinctive worldview.

Understanding these different worldviews allows you ready insights into different people’s motivators – what interests them, pleases them, feels ‘right’ to them; and their blockers – the attitudes and habits that can drive negative behaviours towards others and which also get in the way of them fulfilling their own potential.

Working with the model can help you identify why certain situations cause you particular anxiety, and what to do about it; and it can help you plan how best to approach others to get the best out of them. The Centaur model is thus a powerful tool for both individual development and enhancing effective teamwork. See the pdf link at the bottom for a little more detail and for some background information.

Role of a Coach

A large part of the benefit of a good coach comes not so much from direct input of ideas and suggested solutions, as from the coach’s ability to simply listen as you talk through your thoughts and concerns on all aspects of your business life. In this way, I can be a “sounding board”, a source of perspective and objective assessment: someone who is interested in you, not just your output, who will listen, understand, support…and challenge.

In this role, I can help you to:
  • Reflect, see patterns, draw links between events – a critical strategic skill often lost in the hurly-burly of day-to-day working life
  • Reappraise facts and consider options, providing a safe “testing ground” for ideas and decisions you are mulling over
  • Understand and manage your emotional reaction to events – learning to use your emotional intelligence as an asset, so that in stressful situations, instead of feeling constrained or diminished, or unhelpfully impulsive, you can take a confident leading role.
  • Understand and manage the “political” situation – providing a space to explicitly consider this vital but often-hidden side of organisational life: working alongside colleagues, navigating complex organisational cultures and managing your profile.

And thus you will be able to…
  • Make more considered judgements and better thought-through decisions
  • Learn more effectively from your own experiences
  • Understand yourself better and gain greater personal fulfilment.




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