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Essay: Executive Coaching in Times of Organizational Change

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  • Published: 15 September 2019*
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Executive Coaching in Times of Organizational Change

Abstract:

In historic times executive coaching has been widely used as development and change intervention for individuals. But till what threshold does it actually bring change to the overall organization. Executive coaching is mostly used when any organization is going through a change to help executive develop the psychological and behavioral skills needed to focus in order to achieve organization goals while dealing with the turbulence associated with organizational change. Very little research has been done on the impact of executive coaching during period of organizational change.

Introduction:

Organizational turbulence is nowadays become a part of everyday experience in the organization in this western commercial world. Organizational turbulence is defined as nontrivial, rapid, and discontinuous change in an organization, brought about by events such as restructurings, downsizings, sales, and spin-offs of assets and acquisitions, the effects of which are often experienced as disconcerting. (Cameron, 1987)

Whereas in the previous century was a part of designated mergers & acquisitions or pre-planned cultural change development initiative, since 2000 the rate at which the organizations are undergoing change has become uncertain, resulting in greater stress on managers and executives. Because of 2007 Global Financial Crisis such economic uncertainty and organizational turbulence have been particularly evident. Not surprisingly, the executives and managers working under such uncertainty tend to lack psychological and behavioral skills needed to change the organization while attaining goals side by side. Thus under such organizational turbulence building an effective team which delivers organizational goals is the most important attribute of effective leaders although these skills come naturally. The focus of this article is on examining if executive coaching can help executives and managers during times of organizational change.

The Literature on Executive Coaching and Organizational Change: an Overview:

Executive coaching is widely used by various organizations to help their employees and executives to develop their temperament to deal with such sudden change and to support them to align their objectives with work related goals. Thus executive coaching can be understood as building relationship between a client who has leadership, managerial authority and a coach who uses his/her psychological and behavioral skills to help the client achieve organizational goals and help improve their leadership skills and effectiveness of the organization.

The literature on executive coaching has increased as per the time. A search of the database PsycINFO conducted in January 2013 using the keywords ‘executive coaching’ found a total of 487 citations, with the first published article being Sperry’s (1993) discussion article describing the needs of executives and how psychologists can respond to their need for consulting, coaching, and counseling. There were 31 citations between 1993 and 1999 and 99 citations between 2000 and 2005 and a total of 356 citations between 2006 and 2013.

This academic literature depicts elongated use of executive coaching by consultants and practitioners to cope up with the change related issues. Cross-indexing the terms ‘executive coaching’ and ‘change’ identified a total of 111 citations. This means that 22.28% of the literature on executive coaching in PsycINFO is in relation to the issues with change. However, out of these 111 citations 91 are opinion articles discussing how theoretical models can be used to incorporate personal change among executive clients. Therapy into coaching methods can help leaders develop a repertoire of crisis resiliency and value-directed change management skills or how coaching can help executives change on a personal level.

Few Empirical Studies on Change-Related Executive Coaching:

Of the identified 111 citations only 21 were empirical studies. The majority of these (n ¼ 15) used a case study methods or retrospective survey approaches. There were only three within-subjects studies and two between-subjects studies with only one randomized controlled study exploring the effectiveness of executive coaching in times of organizational change. (GRANT, 2013). Careful studying of the literature depicts that concerns have been expressed in the literature about how executive coaching can indeed be effective over time or it could be merely a fad, problematic or unhelpful or executive coaches, consultants and practitioners lack psychological training could do more harm than good. Thus more in-depth research is required to understand the effect of executive coaching particularly when organization is undergoing change.

The existing research explores the effects of coaching during times of organizational change tend to be qualitative or exploratory. For example, Fahy (2007) presented an exploratory case study in which they used grounded theory approach to see what role executive coaching playes at senior management level when undergoing an organizational change and Schnell (2005) presented a detailed case study of executive coaching as a support mechanism during a period of organizational growth and evolution. Such exploratory research with grounded theory approaches can give in-depth into individuals lived experience, but lack in qualitative and quantitative data which is essential in order to develop comprehensively a good knowledge base.

The main aim of this study is that, to date, very little is known from quantitative perspective about what executive coaching role plays when organization is undergoing a major change because they are important as they provide aggregate measures of change and openly allows comparison between various studies and different population-key factors in the accumulation of knowledge and the ongoing development of an evidence-based approach to coaching. But one drawback of these quantitative evaluations is they do not give individual participants experience, both qualitative and quantitative measures were used in the present study.

The extent to which coaching helps develop personal change readiness – the capacity to cope with the uncertainties that organizational change introduces into one’s work life – is not also known, nor the extent to which coaching helps develop leadership self-efficacy, resilience, or workplace satisfaction. Hence the aim of the present study was to explore these issues and so doing further develop the knowledge base associated with executive coaching. (GRANT, 2013)

Relevance of Coaching in Times of Organizational Change:

Given the above delineations of the coaching process, there are many advantages that why coaching might indeed help executives’ functions more efficiently during organizational change or turbulence.

Firstly in order to deal and cope up with organizational uncertainty, , executives need to able to stand back from the day-to-day cut-and-thrust of corporate life and engage in the flexible strategic thinking necessary to understand and constructively react to emergent and unpredictable issues, and such reflexivity sits at the core of the coaching process. Second, for leadership to function effectively, a leader should have good personal insights – awareness of one’s own personal thoughts, feelings and behavior and articles have proves that coaching have been shown to increase such insights.

When working in global businesses scenario with complex adaptive systems which are in turbulence, problem-focused diagnostic and casual analysis may not be of good help and also it may deviate from goal progression. Leaders need to stay focused and they need to change their thinking from a diagnostic approach to solution based approach in order to find a solution and research papers have shown that coaching tend to increase solution focused thinking. Not least, self-effi
cacy is also a key factor in helping individuals deal with situations that are novel, unpredictable, or stressful and coaching has been shown to increase both self-efficacy and management skills.

Organizations practicing Executive Coaching:

Effective coaching works when leaders are effective and develop their proficiency in order to work with organizational change. Through these articles and research papers we tend to have vague idea that executive coaching helps them identify when teamwork is important and to use their skills to foster it. Coaching builds skills and capacities for increased results and more effective working relationships.

Coaching paves the way for decision-makers to create higher levels of organizational effectiveness through dialogue, inquiry and positive interactions. Coaching creates awareness, purpose, competence and well being among participants. Coaching is NOT another feel-good exercise based in soft skills that have no correlation to the bottom line.

In an article in the Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb 1998) entitled The Employee-Customer-Profit Chain at Sears, by Rucci, Kirn and Quinn, a model was developed indicating that a 5 “unit” increase of employee attitude led to 1.3 “unit” increase in customers’ positive impression, resulting in 0.5% increase in revenue growth.

One study examined the effects of executive coaching in a public sector municipal agency. Thirty-one managers underwent a conventional managerial training program, followed by 8 weeks of one-on-one executive coaching. Training” which included goal setting, collaborative problem solving, practice, feedback, supervisory involvement, evaluation of end-results, and a public presentation” increased productivity by 22.4%. Training and coaching increased productivity by 88%, a significantly greater gain compared to training alone. (Public Personnel Management; Washington; Winter 1997; Gerald Olivero; K Denise Bane; Richard E Kopelman)

“Companies like EDS, Chrylser and Herman Miller use coaching to create a culture of high performance, change and learning. Xerox, IBM, Microsoft and many others are training thousands of managers to become coaches. Executive coaches in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo are helping CEO’s and senior and middle managers to unleash their unused potential for increased performance, satisfaction and results” (Masterful Coaching, Robert Hargrove).

Between 25 and 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies use executive coaches, according to the Hay Group, a major human-resources consultancy. Lee, Hecht, Harrison, the world’s leading career management firm, derives a full 20% of its revenues from executive coaching. Manchester, Inc., a similar national firm, finds that about six out of ten organizations currently offer coaching or other developmental counseling to their managers and executives. Another 20 percent of companies, they said, plan to offer coaching within the next year.

Although it was once used as an intervention with troubled staff, coaching is now part of the standard leadership development training for executives in such companies as IBM, Motorola, J.P. Morgan Chase, Hewlett-Packard and many others. Companies such as Merrill Lynch, and sales-based organizations like insurance firms use coaches to bolster performance of people in high-pressure stressful jobs. (Lassiter, 2004).

In some of the cases executive coaching is used towards correcting management behavior problems such as poor communication skills, failure to develop subordinates, or indecisiveness. More or less it is widely used to enhance leadership skills of high potential individuals. Coaching can help ensure the success or decrease the failure rate of newly promoted managers.

 

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