Coaching is having a moment

Opinion

People turn to coaching for myriad reasons, but learning to think independently and ask open questions is a skill set that will benefit any leadership role and help develop your teams.

I am sure I am not alone in being struck by how many people on LinkedIn have posted that they are taking a coaching course.

Sometimes it’s associated with a significant change in someone’s career chapter, and with others, simply the desire to learn a new skill and be a better leader.

Whatever the motivation, it is fair to say that coaching is having a bit of a moment. And about time too.

Executive coaching is not a new profession

Coaching emerged as a profession in the 1980s, as senior leaders sought to borrow techniques used to improve performance in sport and apply them to business contexts.

The International Coaching Federation (ICF), which I belong to as an accredited practitioner, was founded in 1995 and has established common professional standards, competencies, and ethics for the sector. This was an important form of self-regulation that enabled the various coaching approaches, ranging from Gestalt to cognitive-behavioural and systems, to emerge whilst adhering to some common principles of good practice. 

Being coached requires effort

What unites all coaching practitioners is that, unlike mentors who will offer advice based on experience, all coaches encourage their clients to think independently.

It is key for your coach not to lead their clients towards a pre-determined solution. Mentoring is invaluable as it allows us to learn from someone else’s experience.

Coaching, on the other hand, is there to encourage you to learn from your own experience and consider ideas on how to move forward that only you could have come up with.

People often misunderstand this crucial difference and can be disappointed when they discover their coach is not there to give them the answers. No matter how experienced they are. 

The importance of independent thinking

I think anyone who has had a good coaching relationship will recognise the power of being encouraged to think independently rather than being given specific direction and advice.

It relies on growing self-awareness, confronting limiting self-beliefs, and taking a step back to consider the range of choices available in any given scenario.

It doesn’t rely on the coach being immersed in your own organisation, ways of working or area of expertise. For example, I have successfully coached someone working in the prison service, which couldn’t be further from my own career experience in marketing.  

The best non-executives know how to coach

If you want to pursue a non-executive career path, relearning the art of listening is critical.

After decades in senior executive roles, where we are required to have a point of view and be accountable for the decisions we make, a non-executive position requires us to rediscover our ability to help others think differently and for themselves. 

A non-executive role is more about the ability to spot patterns, challenge gracefully, and foster psychological safety for honest conversations in board meetings than about having the right answers yourself.

Asking good questions with the intention of offering better support and challenge to the executive team will make you more effective than simply giving your own opinion. If the CEO wants to know what you would do in their position, they will ask you. It is more valuable to them if you help them expand their own thinking. 

Coaching as a leadership style

I wish I had learnt more about coaching during my executive career. I would have been more patient in drawing out my team’s perspectives much earlier in my leadership journey. I look back and realise that I was too quick to critique and give my own view. 

In a world of constant disruption, any leader who can coach rather than instruct their people is more likely to build a team of good thinkers. A team who are encouraged to solve problems not encountered before.

Many of us receive the advice to ‘go to your boss with solutions, not problems’ if we want to progress early on in our careers. But how many of us are encouraged to resist giving an opinion and instead ask open questions? 

Accelerating change

I was fortunate enough to be assigned a brilliant coach towards the end of my time as an executive at Aviva.

I am pretty sure that coaching support was the secret weapon that enabled me to move from being a group brand director, a well-established and understood role I had inherited, to global inclusion director, a role that had never existed before, and one I had to create.

There was no one to mentor me. That was the point. But being coached enabled me to think through my options as I developed my plans with someone to act as a sounding board. 

The time and space to think

Coaching gave me the time and space to have an effective conversation with myself about how best to proceed. I was constantly amazed by what surfaced during sessions as potential stumbling blocks, and how many more choices I had when I actually gave myself the time to consider them. 

Coaching does have a therapeutic aspect to it as well. Leadership can be a lonely business at times, and your coach gets to know you well enough to allow real honesty.

The confidential setting should enable you to share the truth of your hopes and anxieties without fear of any judgment. But a good coach is also there to challenge some of your thinking and, most importantly, to encourage decisions and action, not just to be an empathetic ear. 

Coaching democratised

In the past, coaching tended to be the preserve of the most senior executive team of any organisation. However, as more people train to become coaches and launch their own practices, we can expect prices to come down across the board. This is already making coaching accessible to more people, to such an extent that they can increasingly contemplate self-funding. 

Sometimes they are utilising redundancy payments to invest in coaching support whilst they rethink the best next steps career-wise. But there are increasing numbers of ambitious senior managers who want to find a way to accelerate their progress.

These are people who have reached the limits of developing their technical skills and want to find a way to enhance their ability to learn on the job as leaders. Finding that their company no longer have the training budgets available to invest in their development, they are taking matters into their own hands. 

Coaching has gone mainstream

Many people approach me directly, asking for a chat over coffee about how to get into coaching. They are curious about how I became a coach, ask for advice on where to study, and often want to understand what it might take to become a practitioner themselves. 

My going-in position is that studying any aspect of coaching and gaining credentials is always a no-regrets decision. The amount you will learn about yourself, let alone how to better coach others, is invaluable insight, whatever path your career takes in the future.

So, if you are thinking about it and can afford the time and money, I would encourage everyone to do it.