Coach class

There used to be a gag to the effect that when Elvis Presley died in 1977 there were 41 professional Elvis impersonators – or “Elvii” – but a decade later this had exploded to 50,000. At that rate, the joke ran, by the year 2000, one out of every three people in the world would be an Elvis impersonator. The same might be said of business coaches, which would leave the remaining one in the statistical threesome either sitting in the audience watching an Elvii or deep in conversation with his business coach.

The proliferation of business coaches was the subject of my most recent column in The Australian Financial Review (“Business coaches: just another bandwagon”, June 30, 2011).

In that column I noted that the number of business coaches in Australia has grown from “a few dozen” in 1995, according to one estimate, to 4000 in 2009, according to a global coaching survey by Frank Bresser Consulting in Germany. With 10 per cent of the world’s business coaches, Bresser reckons, Australia has the highest density of business coaches in the world. Makes you proud doesn’t it?

“I have met some impressive individuals who are business coaches but the fact that anybody can be a business coach means that I have also encountered many a spiv, flake and carpetbagger,” I wrote.

“At a business lunch I sat next to … an immaculately coiffured young man fairly jumping out of his skin with conceit. As I listened to his vacuous monologue I made a mental note that he was a nitwit best avoided in future. [It turned out he was a business coach.] He handed me a flashy card and explained that he had come from an ‘HR-slash-recruitment background’ and was ‘passionate’ about coaching. According to his card, he was also a facilitator, trainer and keynote speaker. I half expected to see picture framing and dry cleaning among the list of services.”

Demand for coaches is such that there’s plenty of work for all comers, whether a “trusted adviser” of substance or an opportunistic chancer.

“Coaches have become a must-have C-suite accessory,” I wrote. “Business leaders who want to supercharge the performance of their executives assign them coaches and HR departments hire them en masse to have ‘coaching conversations’ with bemused employees.

“[I]t is hard to shake the suspicion that fashion, gullibility and insecurity also fuel the popularity of coaching. Some executives believe they can no longer do their job without a coach. In straitened economic times, coaching has also become a reward of dubious value in lieu of proper pay rises. HR departments have so fulsomely embraced coaching as an ‘employee engagement’ tool that in many companies coaching has become a trite organisational cliché.”

One correspondent, a Sydney provider of executive training programs, shared my concern about the burgeoning population of business coaches.

“There are so many business coaches out there … it’s a real worry,” she wrote. However, she could understand the demand for coaches.

“Leadership today is becoming increasingly complicated and so it’s not uncommon for executives to look for some outsider perspective and expert advice. They draw on people with specialist skills so that they can receive tailored strategies on the capabilities they need to develop. Many of these issues are confidential or delicate in their nature, so it may not be appropriate for them to share these areas of development with friends or even close colleagues.

“In my opinion, to offer an effective service, business coaches should have some solid certifications in organisational psychology coupled with extensive senior management experience.”

A Melbourne management academic was kind enough to suggest that my comments were “spot on”. If coaching has a place in business, he wasn’t saying so.

“Half the world is calling themselves a ‘coach’ nowadays and I’ve always wondered what many of them have actually achieved in their own right within their professional careers,” he wrote. “It also says something about the state of many executives who hire these cowboys as their personal coaches.”

Another Melbourne reader, a management consultant, has clients who use business coaches and he is at a loss to understand why. He has no time for business coaches.

“Your description of business coaches and the overall little value they add, with the exceptional few, was fantastic,” he wrote. “I still find it amazing that any fool without any formal qualifications or genuine life experience can become one.”

A Sydney-based senior executive with a major financial services company admitted that he used to be “very suspicious” of coaching until his employer required him to use one as part of a leadership development initiative that required executives to meet with a company-supplied coach on a regular basis.

The experience was so beneficial that he undertook training to become an accredited business coach in his own right. This executive’s university qualifications include a PhD in political science and doctorate in business administration.

That’s a pretty impressive endorsement of business coaching. But while recognising the benefits of coaching, he retains his scepticism.

“I’ve seen too many coaches over the years. It’s almost like a status symbol these days. Some senior managers use coaches as a crutch,” he said in conversation with me.

“When it’s used properly and with care, coaching is a useful adjunct but there are a lot of charlatans out there. Unfortunately that can mean that we’re all tarred with the brush.”

It seems to me that while there is some recognition of the role of business coaching, the overall feeling is of suspicion and scepticism. The business coaching “profession” would do well to get its house in order.

Do you agree? Write and tell me your views.

BRW

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