
			Feature Article

Caveat Emptor: Coaching
By Arthur Amdurer and James Eicher

It probably doesn't come as a surprise that the business of coaching is booming. According to the consulting and outplacement firm, Lee Hecht Harrison the market for coaching is over $7 billion dollars per year. The Hay Group consultancy reports that between 25 and 40 percent of Fortune 500 executives use executive coaches. It seems like everyone is a coach, wants a coach, wants to be a coach, has a coach or wants to have someone on his or her staff coached.

With a profession that is so fuzzy and littered with disappointment can the "coaching boom" soon lead to the "coaching bust"?

So before you run out and hire a coach, ask yourself the following tough question: Am I - or is my organization - abdicating management responsibility to someone outside my organization?

More and more we hear about coaches stepping into situations that need to be addressed by the manager. In many instances executives are creating "shadow managers" in the organizations. While that may be fine for those helping themselves to substantial coaching engagements, in the long run it is only deleterious to the organization. Perhaps your organization has a bonafide, ROI-driven reason to acquire this resource. If you think so, here are seven pitfalls to think about.

1. Too Broad
Many coaches - in an effort to secure business and following the lead of many of the major consulting companies - claim to be able to solve any of your business's problems. If you are in a crisis you may not realize that coaching is most successful when applied at a subject matter expert level, skill or competency focused, to gain a specific business result. Don't let panic sway your decision regarding the skill set of the coach. Organizations that provide coaching services that use sports analogies in their marketing raise a red flag here: sports coaches always have specific, competency-based mission with definable results. You need the same. So ask yourself if you are trying to boil the ocean when all you need is a hot cup of tea.

2. Too Narrow
In reference to No.1, our experience is that successful coaching engagements focus on a specific set of problems. With that said, the difficult part is finding an individual that has industry specific, subject matter skills who at the same time has the force of personality and creative spark to ignite the individuals you want coached. The coaching hire begs the same level of analysis that you use to hire the best talent in your organization. Sometime this will require someone that knows all of "hard goods" not just chain saws and can cover an entire category of knowledge.

3. Too Inexperienced
Today there are numerous ways for individuals to get information about coaching. There are Web sites, schools and even a "Coach U". There is one thing that can't be taught, however - experience - particularly the industry-specific experience that drives the coaches' value.

Recently we met a very bright 24-year-old women and Yale graduate (as she reminded us numerous times). When asked what she did, she declared confidently that she was a "work-life coach". A 24-year old "work-life coach" begs to be included in the dictionary under the entry for Oxymoron. The one piece of advice that we could give ANY 24-year "work-life coach" is to "get a life".

4. Too Long
In speaking with many organizations that offer a coaching service, we hear that there is a minimum three-month or six-month coaching contract. Why? The problem, solution, outcomes and proposed timetable need to be defined and agreed upon before the engagement as part of the proposal as with any best in class consulting engagement. And this needs to be made directly between the coach and the coached. In too many organizations we see third-party staff (e.g., HR, IT) brokering the relationship, taking the place of the targeted individual's manager. This complicates the process and is a sure way to extend the engagement.

5. Too Expensive
What are the multiple financial returns on the investment you are making with this individual? Especially when it may involve talking to someone for up to one year, whom you've never met and never see? The financial returns cannot be "guesstimates" based on perceived value. Unless you have a clear, contractual specification of return, buyers beware. Ignore the "feel good " factor on this one - coaching is not therapy. Let us face it, you expect more concrete results from your broker who is only making $30.00 on each trade.

6. Too Loose
Coaches should have an approach; one that fits both your strategic needs and demonstrates an understanding of how your organization executes its strategy. The steps to the process leading to proposed outcomes should be easily explained, viewed and understood. Regardless of whether the needed coaching is interpersonal, technical, or industry specific, it needs to occur in the current business context of your organization. In fact, the decision to hire a coach must be driven by a critical business issue.

The ethereal approach of some coaching gurus to "get in there and talk to some people first" is fine as long as you're not paying them to do that part of the engagement. Do you make large corporate purchases for the next fiscal year without knowing your organization's strategic plans, manufacturing processes and current and future inventory?

7. Too complicated
Albert Einstein was fond of saying "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." Coaches have made coaching a more time-consuming and costly process than it needs to be - diagnosis, prognosis, 360-degree feedback, values assessment, leadership assessment, behavioral style assessments - lead to a feeding frenzy of superfluous data. If the solution is not intuitively obvious in three minutes or less, then you have hired someone from a large consulting firm. What more can we say?

Hiring the Coaching
"Coaches are everywhere these days...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." Fortune, May 21, 2000.

There are bonafide reasons to hire a coach. One reason might be that there is a lack of leadership's demand to improve internal corporate services. Another is part of today's growing trend to outsource all manner of internal organizational activities due to relentless cost pressures. Finally, no matter how effective or smart an individual is, there are skills and competencies that he or she needs to learn and perform better.

An organization can benefit when a coach is carefully selected to targeted ROI-driven performance improvement, applying the same rigorous standards to the coaching hire as to any other mission-critical hire. When developing a set of standards to counter the ad-hoc pitfalls previously discussed, consider the following:
1. An individual with a solid understanding of your industry specific business.
2. A facile practitioner of the "velvet hammer" who can at the same time develop rapport, exercise executive ego control and have the credible subject matter knowledge.
3. The coaching equation involves hiring an individual who has worked or consulted in your targeted area a commensurate number of years relative to the person you want to coach and has an understanding of the pressures faced by today's executives and managers.
4. Coaching is a project and needs to be executed the same way involving a project plan, clearly delineated roles and responsibilities, milestones, deliverables, metrics and expected results.
5. As an extension of No. 4, the coaching project involves a budget with the ROI to both the coached employees and the organization's business performance clearly spelled out.
6. The coach needs to have the ability to think strategically, enabling the coached to understand the link between strategic business implications and tactical execution and how to get there.
7. The coach needs to be able to keep the solution simple.

One final note is that you also need to think about the coach's ability to rapidly learn the organization and quickly develop rapport with all of the potential stakeholders.

Arthur Amdurer and James Eicher are Prinicpals with the consulting firm CEO. Visit their web site for additional information at Center for Effectiveness in Organizations, LLC