Is Coaching a Dirty Word?

Is Coaching a Dirty Word?

Although a relatively modern phenomenon, coaching has reached the mainstream in organisational life.  Often confined to the C-suite and used sparingly as a performance intervention, there is an air of mystery about what coaching is exactly.  Adding to the confusion is the influx of social media savvy life coaches marketing ‘recovery’ programmes and sharing motivational meme’s and inspirational quotes to a millennial audience looking for purpose and meaning.  Maybe thanks to a little leftover DNA from coaching’s distant cousin ‘therapy’, this idea that coaching fixes something that is broken or replaces something that is missing seems to prevail.  The result is that coaching is both prevalent and widely misunderstood.  Unsurprisingly, when coaching appears on the learning and development agenda, it can be received with scepticism and distrust.  So, perhaps coaching IS a dirty word.

To find out, we surveyed over 700 organisations and asked them what coaching meant to them.  We found that a fifth of all organisations considered coaching to be a remedial intervention that addresses poor performance and almost two thirds (60%) described coaching in terms of an executive coaching relationship between either an internal or external coach.

Predictably, 68% of respondents also told us that the prevailing leadership style in their organisations was predominantly or mostly command and control.  In these organisations, coaching seems to be something that happens to you rather than as an enabler of change.  It is trapped behind closed doors with no way of entering the ‘operational’ day-to-day life of the organisation. Despite more frequent occurrences of coaching in organisations it appears that a strong cultural bias plays a pivotal role in how coaching materialises in an organisation.  And as a business imperative the waters are still muddy.  6 out of 10 respondents told us with brutal honesty that they did not measure or capture the ROI of coaching and a whopping 93% had no idea what the typical return on investment (ROI) of their coaching programmes was.  Without being able to demonstrate that coaching is having a tangible impact on the bottom line, it is little wonder that coaching encounters a lukewarm reception.