This document discusses coaching in the workplace. It provides several definitions of coaching, emphasizing that coaching is a two-way conversation between manager and employee that leads to improved performance through learning. The document outlines some common barriers to coaching, such as organizational culture, fear, and a lack of coaching skills. It stresses that coaching helps employees develop their own thinking and potential. For coaching to be effective, managers must receive training and practice, and organizations must support a coaching culture from the top-down.

1. There are many definitions of coaching. One
which I find useful is by the writer Denis
Kinlaw: “Successful coaching is a mutual
conversation between manager and employee
that follows a predictable process and leads to
superior performance, commitment to sustained
improvement, and positive relationships.”
This definition is attractive because it stresses
the two way aspect of coaching. Coaching is a
conversation rather than a monologue. Having
a predictable process allows for repeatability
and training. This is important in organisations
where too often the coaching process is so
informal that there is no real structure or
follow up.
The aim of coaching is always to have better
performance and it is my belief that the
relationship between manager and employee is
key to effective performance. Recent research by
Gallup has shown that the key factor in
successful performance is the relationship
between manager and employee.
The coach facilitates learning and does not
own the problem. The coach helps the person
being coached develop their own thinking and
awareness. Many managers make the mistake of
trying to own their employees’ problems with
the result that they end up taking responsibility
– and learning – away from the person.
Coaching, therefore, is about letting the
employee perform to their full potential.
■ The need for coaching
As we change from an industrial society to a
service and knowledge economy, the need is for
employees who can think for themselves, be
creative and react quickly and appropriately to
different situations. The command and control
model cannot work in this environment, as people
need to be able to think independently. If
employees have to wait for the boss to decide, or if
they let their boss do all the thinking for them,
then it slows down the whole organisation and it
eventually becomes a dinosaur.
There is an expression, “To take the monkey”,
meaning that you end up taking on other people’s
problems and issues. This is extremely common in
management for two reasons. First, the manager
very often thinks that their job is to solve
problems. Second, as a result of hierarchy and
command and control cultures, many employees
have got used to letting someone else do their
thinking for them. At Ashridge, we see in our
workshops many examples of managers whose
default style is to go immediately to giving advice
– the “Why don’t you” style of management.
Coaching for
development
Executive coaching is a growth business.The marketplace is increasingly
crowded with messianic motivational coaches. Amid the hype, the real power
and purpose of coaching can be forgotten. Mike Brent brings coaching
back to the basics of learning and development.
Mike Brent is a senior
consultant in Ashridge
Consulting and has trained
and consulted with major
international companies all
over the world, as well as
lecturing at several business
schools. He is interested in
the nature of challenge and
creativity in organisations, in
helping managers develop
their coaching skills, and in
facilitating change.
Email: mike.brent
@ashridge.org.uk
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2. Instead of asking questions, and listening, when
an employee comes to them, many managers feel
obliged to offer their solution. Apart from the fact
that the boss is not always right, this leads to a
mental laziness from the employee, who is not
being forced to think the issues through and come
up with different courses of action.
A further impetus to coaching is the shift from
management to leadership (although
organisations still need both). In this new
leadership paradigm, leaders must be able to
coach. Coaching is essentially about creating and
generating options and alternatives. If your only
style is to tell people what to do, you are not
empowering or enabling them. You are not
growing and developing your most important
resource. And, you are wasting your own
valuable time.
Time is increasingly short because the rate of
change is accelerating and the degree of
complexity encountered by managers increasing
rapidly. Managers are having to deal less with
simple puzzles, and more with complex problems
and dilemmas (see Figure 1). The difference is that
with puzzles, there are answers available, and they
can often be solved by an individual. With
complex problems, they are less evident and are
likely to need input from different sources to
solve them.
And then there are dilemmas which don’t have
any solutions, only options and alternatives. For
example, the question, “What should our strategy
be for the next five years?” has no single correct
answer waiting to be discovered. This is a
dilemma, not a puzzle nor a problem. All
managers can do is to engage in dialogue, listen,
be creative and come up with different options
and alternatives. Then they need to objectively
analyse the alternatives and choose the one that
has a chance of engaging the organisation’s
attention and energy.
If we confuse puzzles with dilemmas, then we
are in danger of simplifying the issue, imposing
dogma instead of looking together for alternatives.
As one manager said: “It’s got to be an extremely
simple question to have an answer.”
Unfortunately, in reality there are no longer that
many simple questions.
■ Abandoning the security of knowing
The question for managers must be: If you’re not
coaching your people how are you managing them? If
coaching can be defined as unlocking potential, if
managers aren’t unlocking it, what are they doing?
Coaching – unlocking potential, developing
people, promoting learning and confidence – is
the key role of the manager. More and more of the
problems the manager faces are human ones
rather than technical ones.
Many managers are excellent at solving technical
issues, but are not so good at dealing with human
ones. One of the key roles of a manager is to
develop his or her people. It is not always an easy
role to play. One manager, talking about the move
from being the expert to being the coach, put it
nicely when he said: “It’s very uncomfortable to
leave the comfort and security of knowing.”
Coaching is about helping people, enabling
them to achieve something they want to achieve,
whether it may be promotion, skills, performance
or self-understanding or better balance. It has to
be client centred and not coach, or even
organisation, centred.
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NEED TO
SHARE
CONFLICT
POTENTIAL
COACHING IN A COMPLEX ENVIRONMENT
COMPLEXITY
UNCERTAINTY
+
–
+–
Figure 1. Source: Critchley and Casey1
PUZZLES
PROBLEMS
ONS
DILEMMAS
Coaching for
development
Ashridge Business School UK - http://www.ashridge.org.uk

3. The argument for coaching in terms of
competitiveness is among the most
straightforward. When products and services are
similar, competitive advantage comes from having
people with ideas, skills, responsibility and
initiative. Learning makes the difference and the
core idea of coaching is to develop others – to
help them learn. Without coaching this cannot be
achieved. Ultimately, as the environment grows
more and more complex, performance will be as a
result of learning. To paraphrase Reg Revans, the
founder of action learning, if the environment
changes faster than your organisation learns,
you’re out of business. This means that managers
cannot wait for the rest of the organisation to
change before they change. We all have to take
individual responsibility for learning.
■ Why don’t managers coach?
There are many reasons why managers do not
actually use coaching in their everyday lives. Some
of the main ones are: organisational culture;
fear; not convinced it works; lack of skill; coaching is
seen as remedial.
Culture. Many of the managers in our workshops
raise objections to the idea of coaching – typical
remarks are – “It won’t work here”, “We don’t have
the time”, “It’s tree hugging”, etc. Few admit to
being afraid or unprepared to coach. We found this
resistance rather surprising initially, and resented
wasting time, as we thought, dealing with this
resistance. What we saw were organisational
cultures that, although paying for coaching
workshops, were in reality paying lip service to the
philosophy behind the concept of coaching – one
in which continuous learning and growth are seen
as important. Although top management were
convinced of the need to have a coaching culture,
not all of the managers actually used coaching as a
way of managing their own employees.
Many participants reported that although they
were keen to coach, they felt that their hierarchical
superiors were not on board, and that it would be
a waste of time to implement coaching in their
own teams. Too often organisations send their
managers on coaching workshops to gain
transactional skills, without linking coaching to
the larger, strategic aim of transformation. If
coaching is seen as the latest fad, it will have no
effect on performance.
Fear. Few managers would admit to being afraid
of coaching, but we often see managers who are
extremely anxious about their ability to coach.
There are a number of skills, attitudes and tools
which need to be mastered if one is to become an
effective coach. Managers need to be supported
and they need training in these techniques.
Not convinced. Sometimes we see managers
who see no value in changing their command and
control style to a coaching one. These managers
tell us that their job is to give advice. If an
employee has an issue or a problem, the manager
doesn’t feel it is right to spend time eliciting the
employee’s own thoughts. They feel it is a waste of
time to coach and that there is nothing to gain by
helping employees develop their own thinking.
Although giving advice or telling employees
what to do is appropriate in some circumstances –
emergencies, for example – it is not a means of
developing employees. In reality, we found that
these managers’ subordinates actually wanted to
be coached.
Coaching as remedial. Many participants come
to coaching workshops with the idea that coaching
is remedial. This is a barrier in the sense that they
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If your only style is to tell people
what to do, you are not empowering
or enabling them.You are not
growing and developing your
most important resource.
Ashridge Business School UK - http://www.ashridge.org.uk

4. don’t think it is something that could be used
every day with all team members, but just as a tool
to be used with poor performers. If they tried a
coaching approach with anyone else, that person
resisted because they felt they were then being
considered as a poor performer.
■ Making coaching work
There are many models which can be used in
training managers to be more effective coaches.
However the real value of the coaching training
lies in the actual practising of coaching, with
participants bringing real issues to the workshop.
In our experience, role playing is not as effective as
working with real issues. After all, when you are
back in the organisation, you don’t have the
option of saying, “This was just a game”.
Making coaching work requires a number of
things:
■ Recognition that coaching is not time
consuming. One of the common objections
to coaching is that it takes too much time. The
opposite is true. Simply telling people what to
do is what actually consumes time. You can
coach in a five minute session simply by
developing the reflex of asking rather than
telling. Too often managers are tempted to
use the “Why don’t you” model, instead of
asking people what their own thoughts and
options are. Almost any interaction can be
done in a coaching style, although we don’t
recommend asking people for their different
options and alternatives in the middle of an
emergency.
■ Coaching needs a supportive organisational
culture. It is vital to have a coaching culture
within the organisation, otherwise it fails. The
coaching culture has to come from a strong
belief that it can add value to both individuals
and the organisation, and is not simply seen
as a sheep dip reflex or fad.
■ Successful coaching is about more than
simply developing skills and techniques. If
the right attitude is not there, no amount of
skills will make you a good coach.
■ Workshops are not enough. If all you do is
organise some coaching workshops for your
managers, but then do not support a coaching
environment, then at best, you are wasting
money. Just paying lip service to the idea of
coaching is counter productive. Many
participants in our workshops fully
understand the importance of developing a
coaching style, but if they go back to a boss
who uses old fashioned command and
control styles, and does not support coaching
in practise, there is a strong possibility that
they will stop using their coaching skills.
■ Top management must communicate the
importance of coaching. It is vital that senior
management support the coaching initiative.
This means that they have to be visible in
supporting it, show up at the workshops to
demonstrate its importance, and also reward
those who use it in practice, and most
importantly, use it themselves and encourage
other senior colleagues to use it. Coaching is
often seen only as transactional when it
should be transformational.
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Coaching for
development
Coaching needs a supportive
organisational culture. It is vital to
have a coaching culture within the
organisation, otherwise it fails.
Ashridge Business School UK - http://www.ashridge.org.uk

5. ■ For coaching to be most effective, it is
important for senior members of the
management team to point out the strategic
importance of coaching to the participants.
A coaching culture will not survive in the
organisation unless it is seen to add value to
the strategy of the organisation and improve
the quality of organisational life. As consultants
and trainers we can remind participants of this,
but it is clearly the responsibility of the
organisation’s leaders to communicate it.
■ Resistances to the idea of managers using a
coaching style must be acknowledged and
brought into the open. Some managers do
resist and it is important to listen to their
concerns.
■ Coaching must not be seen as a fad or only
as remedial. The aim of coaching is to help
people achieve their potential, and everyone,
at all levels, can benefit. No serious
sportsman or woman would consider not
using a coach – why shouldn’t managers?
■ When training managers to be coaches, there
must be practice sessions using real issues as
well as theory. The real learning comes by
doing, and getting feedback.
■ Coaching must take account of cross-cultural
differences – especially when people are being
trained how to coach.
■ Coaching must be linked to strategy. If we only
focus on change at an individual level then the
effort and initiative will be lost. On the other
hand, if we work on strategy but forget
implementation, then we are wasting time.
■ Implementation is always carried out by
individuals and a process is needed to work
through the implementation of the strategy.
Coaching is such a process. ■
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Advice to coaches
Here is a list of tips and advice to help you
coach more effectively.They are not a
panacea, but should help you avoid the
most common mistakes.
• Don’t over question – it’s not an
interrogation
• Summarise often
• Be aware of double pressure on you – your
preference for giving advice and the
coachee’s request for advice
• Resist giving advice prematurely
• Try to offer reframes and different
perspectives through questioning
• Remember that coaching should lead to
action
• Identify restraints, especially internal ones
• Check whether the issue is a puzzle,
problem or dilemma
• Balance your reality questions with
questions which move the issue on
• Remember to use the naïve question
• Understand the emotions as well as the logic
• Challenge if necessary, but learn how to
challenge elegantly
• Use “what if” questions
• Ask how important the issue is
• Build on what the coachee is actually
saying, rather than inventing new questions
• Pick up on non-verbal communication.
Notice if people get excited, or sad
• Use more open than closed questions.
REFERENCE
1. Critchley, Bill and
Casey, David. (1984).
”Second thoughts on team
building”, Mead.
RESOURCES
Gallwey, Timothy.
(2000). The Inner Game of
Work, Orion.
Kinlaw, Denis. (1989).
Coaching for Commitment,
Pfeiffer.
Ashridge Business School UK - http://www.ashridge.org.uk