One of the most striking trends in the learning and development field over the past 10 years is the increasing use of coaching as a development method. Why is that?
Increasing pace of change is making effective leadership more crucial
The pace of change has picked up so dramatically in recent years that most organizations are struggling to keep up with the competition, let alone stay ahead of the pack. A hard fought competitive edge that might have set you up for 5 years while the competition scrambled to react may today yield you a six-month headstart.
While the pace of change is impacting all dimensions of organizational life in diverse ways, the underlying implication of all the change we face is that it is increasingly important to have highly capable leaders. While we still acknowledge the importance of creating robust organizations –as systems–there is an increasing awareness that even the best systems may not be flexible enough to respond to rapid changes in the environment without extraordinary leadership. The extraordinary leader can anticipate, learn, shift, and help ensure that the system is adapting.
So, the talent development system needs to be great at identifying those with leadership potential and helping them to develop as rapidly as possible.
So, what has this got to do with leaders as coaches?
Coaching has some interesting advantages over more structured approaches to learning. In traditional learning settings, there are well established means of mediating the relationship between a learner and a body of knowledge. If you want to learn what you need to know about corporate finance, there is a well established process to follow–learning certain concepts, in a certain sequence, with clear means to confirm your learning along the way. Moreover, the content and the process is all well articulated–there are books, instructors, videos, practice problems, and all manner of techniques. Some refer to the traditional learning model, typified by the classroom experience, as having “the sage on the stage.” As Assistant Dean of executive education, I am intimately familiar with the traditional model, and can attest to the fact that it has an important place in the arsenal of development approaches.
However, in order to develop leaders quickly, we cannot rely completely or solely on the traditional learning model. To be effective in the rapidly evolving real world of organizations, leaders need to be constantly learning and adapting. The body of knowldge to be learned is evolving with the context, and lessons need to be teased out of a swirling complex of interpersonal and organizational dynamics. However, unlike the traditional learning context, there is no one there to mediate the learning. There is no one to make sure that you are learning what you need to learn.
Enter the coach. In contrast to the traditional learning model, the learning model based on coaching is typified by some as having ”a guide on the side.”
Coaches as learning facilitators
A good executive coach can play many roles, but the role of learning facilitator is critical. In this capacity, the coach helps the individual to process their own experiences, and ensure that the right lessons are being drawn from them. Rather than working from a predetermined curriculum that a “teacher” wants a “student” to learn, the coach starts with the individual’s own experiences, and helps the individual to learn from a process that involves dynamically processing experience in an iterative loop–>individual action–>result/impact–>facilitated reflection.
I have written here and elsewhere about my strong belief in the power of learning from experience, and the coach is essentially an aid who helps the individual to learn from their own experience. Given that external executive coaches are pretty pricey, and can’t be easily scaled beyond a small pool of the most critical talent, we are starting to hear more and more about helping leaders within the organization to get better at this critical skill.
In fact, I decided to write on this topic because today is day one of a new program on The Art and Practice of Leaders Coaching Leaders offered by Carlson Executive Education. While it is too late to enroll in this class, you may be interested in checking out some of the new half-day programs we are offering in the Momentum Series.
Filed under: Executive Education Tagged: | Coaching, Leadership Development
