Just what do we mean by executive coaching? As a starting point, I find it helpful to think about what it's not: It's not mentoring, not therapy, not business process consulting and not career counseling--although it's clearly related to all of those practices. If we could align them on the margins of a multi-dimensional graph, I'd put coaching right in the middle, drawing upon each discipline, but with different methodologies and goals.
Carol Hymowitz's "In The Lead" column in today's Wall Street Journal muddies the waters by using "mentoring," "coaching" and "training" almost interchangeably. It's headlined "Today's Bosses Find Mentoring Isn't Worth The Time and Risks," and the basic premise is that some senior managers believe their time is best spent thinking of ways "to expand their businesses and improve productivity and work quality," not wasted on "coaching employees on how to do their jobs."
The contrarian view, here represented by Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Business School, is that "lack of time for training won't affect performance today or next week...but it will further down the road, when you need a new generation of leaders."
That's a fascinating debate, but it would be easier to understand exactly what's being debated if the language in the article were more precise. "Training" and "mentoring" and "coaching," although clearly related, are different in their aims and their practices. To take an oversimplified view of the distinctions, I'd say that training seeks to improve an employee's job-related skills, mentoring seeks to insure that an employee is on the right path early in his or her career, and coaching seeks to maximize a high-potential employee's fulfillment and effectiveness.
If we take a look at Hymowitz's column with those definitions in mind, I'd say that senior managers...
- ...are right to resist providing training to their reports. More likely than not, training is a time-intensive activity with a low ROI for any individual manager. If a manager is providing hands-on training to an individual report, they're probably taking on a burden that should be shifted back onto the organization as a whole. (Of course, that's just reality in many organizations--but that doesn't make it right.)
- ...are wrong to resist providing mentoring. Properly guiding an early-stage employee will reap rewards not only for the organization, but also for the individual manager who has the opportunity to develop a valuable network of "mentees." Each manager will have to gauge how much time and energy they can devote to mentorship, but it's one of those Important-But-Not-Urgent tasks that an organization neglects at its peril.
- ...should provide coaching when they perceive that a high-potential employee isn't as effective or as fulfilled as he or she could be. If they don't have the time to do it themselves, then they should devote the resources necessary to bring in an external coach. Coaching isn't about helping low performers reach to a minimally acceptable standard--it's about identifying and eliminating the barriers that are keeping your best and brightest from living up to their full potential.
I don't want to sound pedantic, but defining these terms more carefully will allow us to reach better conclusions about whose responsibility they are and how important they are to an individual manager and to the organization as a whole.
