The manager as coach

AUTHOR: Debra Maynard   DATE: 30.08.04   ISSUE 2, 2004
Use coaching frameworks to improve your managerial skills, says Dr Tony Grant.* Deborah Maynard reports.

“Who doesn’t want to develop the skills to be a more effective manager in the workplace?” asked coaching psychology specialist Dr Anthony Grant at an AGSM Lifelong Learning seminar on coaching for enhanced management and leadership skills.
{“A solution-focused framework is a way of thinking about working with other people that is much more focused on acknowledging and building up people’s strengths.”}
ILLUSTRATION: Gregory Baldwin

Grant’s spin on coaching has little to do with the clichés of motivational gurus or even personal coaches for corporate high-flyers. He is more interested in talking about what coaching can offer in the way of practical tools for managers.

Despite “academia’s failure to take the applied human potential movement seriously,” there are lessons in coaching frameworks for managers seeking the know-how to be better team or company leaders, he said.

As the director of the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Sydney, which offers Australia’s only postgraduate course in coaching, Grant draws on his own and others’ research – “about 150 articles in the peer-reviewed academic press” – to show that coaching can have a significant impact on performance and wellbeing.

He advocates a solution-focused coaching framework for managers to be more effective and, “to coach those who work for you to be more effective and improve goal-attainment.

“A solution-focused framework is a way of thinking about working with other people that is much more focused on acknowledging and building up people’s strengths,” Grant said. “It is about working towards constructing solutions, rather than analysing what went wrong and apportioning blame to solve a problem.”

Grant outlined the principles of effective coaching as: collaboration (this is the foundation), accountability (you hold people accountable to the process), awareness (raising someone’s awareness so they can take responsibility), responsibility and action.

“It is a pretty straightforward formula that gets results,” said Grant. “The principles are where the power is and the skill is in taking people through the process.” The point, he said, is to help people to better set and reach goals, improve performance and develop as individuals.

Growing influence
According to Grant, coaching’s corporate influence has grown as a result of significant changes in our working environments. Key changes were disenchantment with command and control, increasing acceptance of personal development, popularisation of emotional intelligence, commercialisation of personal development and consumerisation of self.

One of the reasons people are interested in coaching for developing more effective managerial skills is that IQ is the least best predictor for success at work, said Grant.

“We know that cognitive and technical skills contribute to just one-third of a person’s success at work, and IQ alone contributes just 4 to 25 per cent.1

“For example, if you work as a lawyer at a top firm, IQ is not going to differentiate you because everyone is smart. It is the emotional competencies and people skills that are crucial, particularly at higher managerial levels.”

Grant urged managers to consider the cost of not coaching: “Employees are four times more likely to leave a job with a manager who has poor coaching and interpersonal skills.”

So why don’t people do it? “They feel they’re too busy,” he said. He pointed to the prevalence of a high workload vicious cycle that many organisational cultures reward rather than discourage.

The positive influence of coaching in the workplace is well-recognised in Australia, which is a world leader in applying clinical psychology to life and corporate coaching, Grant said.

However, he is the first to admit “there is a lot of hype out there and we haven’t seen the fallout in the coaching industry yet.”

He advised those seeking to introduce coaching programs to first define their team’s or organisation’s coaching needs and limitations.

It also helped to understand the difference between the main types of coaching and delivery to choose the approach that offers the best organisational fit and return on investment. For example, a development approach focuses on inter- and intra-personal development, a performance approach focuses on a specific time frame, and a work-skills approach is usually task specific over a short period of time.

* Dr Tony Grant teaches the AGSM’s forthcoming executive education program, The Manager as Coach.

Footnote
1 T.W. Morris and E.M. Levinson, ‘Relationship between intelligence and occupational adjustment and functioning: a literature review’, Journal of Counseling & Development, vol. 73, no. 5, pp. 503—14, 1995.