The Wall Street Journal's Phred Dvorak has a front-page article today (subscription-only) on executive coaching, focusing on the experiences of managers at the Kitchell Corporation, a Phoenix construction and real estate firm with annual revenues of $725 million. A few highlights:
- "More than 100 of Kitchell's 700 employees have attended a coaching class," according to Dvorak.
- "Each of Kitchell's top 22 executives has an outside coach, hired at about $300 an hour for sessions every two to four weeks."
- CEO William Schubert plays an active role in the coaching process for his senior staff. For example, he met with William Judge, the company's controller, and Judge's coach to discuss the results of his 360 review. Judge had received "low marks in accessibility and listening skills." Schubert asked him, "What are you going to do about it? Are you going to take it to heart?" Judge recalls, "It was one of those [talks] when you shift around in your seat a bit."
- Kitchell currently spends $200,000 on coaching annually, and Schubert says, "Half a million wouldn't be too much."
- In 2001 Schubert and his colleagues became concerned that the firm's high rate of growth coupled with a large number of pending retirements would result in a management shortage, and they turned to coaching as a means of reducing turnover and sustaining the company's culture. Since that time, Kitchell's annual turnover has declined from 27% to 19%. Turnover among "younger staffers who are being coached by senior employees" is just 4%.
And a few thoughts in response:
- Kitchell has clearly built an organizational culture that respects and values coaching, and it starts with CEO Schubert. I can't imagine how a coaching program could succeed without such a commitment, but Kitchell's prominent support for coaching as a company seems instrumental in their ability to employ the practice to maximum effect.
- If we assume that the company's top 22 executives meet with their $300-an-hour coaches every three weeks, then they're consuming just over half of Kitchell's $200,000 coaching budget. Lacking comparable figures from other companies, I'm making an educated guess here, but given that coaching is typically described as a service for leaders and high-potential staff, the fact that Kitchell spends nearly half of their coaching budget on people other than the top 22 executives seems significant.
- I was a little frustrated when I saw the article's headline: "Construction Firm Rebuilds Managers to Make them Softer." The business press uses such "soft" terminology frequently when describing coaching--"soft skills," "the softer side," etc.--and I think it's an unfortunate choice of words. It suggests that the issues coaching seeks to address are less important and/or easy to tackle. But is it accurate to say that interpersonal skills, conflict management, and motivating people are unimportant tasks? Or that if you're weak in those areas, it's easy to remedy the problem? Of course not. I don't expect this to change--"soft skills" is a useful and readily understood piece of linguistic shorthand--but I think it's worth noting that the language we use shapes our perceptions.
- CEO Schubert says coaching is "touchy feely" and "helps you to be more open with each other," a skill he clearly values. I thought that was interesting because the most meaningful course I took at Stanford Business School was known formally as Interpersonal Dynamics and colloquially as "Touchy Feely." The course uses the T-group method developed by Kurt Lewin and the National Training Laboratory to help students understand how they function in group settings and how they're perceived by others, and its practical effect on prospective MBAs was...to help us be more open with each other. We practiced delivering direct and candid but respectful feedback, an essential skill for any manager, and Schubert's comments reinforce the importance of that course in the curriculum. I'm under the (possibly mistaken) impression that the Stanford faculty and administration may not value Touchy Feely as much as the students and alumni do, and I hope someone at the school sees this article.
tags: coaching executive coaching kitchell phred dvorak william schubert william judge
