Company directors do not question the usefulness of consulting assignments. Visit business coaching is still a long way off. And if it is often seen as costly - something that can easily be challenged - it is because the benefits of this approach are still unclear.
With Jean-Michel Janoueix, a former executive and executive coach, we studied the literature on the return on investment (ROI) of coachingWe have concluded that it is not only inefficiently measured, but also undesirable if its measurement is to remain purely economic and financial. But that in no way means that there are no benefits to professional coaching!
This article is not yet another laundry list of the benefits of business coaching. We prefer to take a step aside and offer a different perspective. We are convinced that the impact of coaching is greater than the sum of its individual benefits. And that this has not yet reached the ears of all managers...
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What benefits can you expect from business coaching?
Investing in people or teams through professional coaching is inherently different from investing in new equipment or software. It is far easier to measure the time saved by a team thanks to new software installed by a consultancy firm than to measure the intrinsic performance of a team whose manager has been coached to develop his or her leadership posture or learn to share constructive feedback.
"Effective coaching outcomes can include self-efficacy, well-being, engagement, satisfaction, performance, [for] an individual, a team and an organisation", says the International Coaching Federation (ICF). But what else?
The famous ROI is all the more difficult to measure because, on the one hand, we have an expense whose amount is certain and known (the coach's fees), but, on the other hand, the benefits are uncertain. They vary according to the type of coaching: individual or team. We will set out the main benefits here, which we have observed in our practice.
The impact of individual coaching
Because it's a personalised form of support, coaching enables people to develop new professional skills, boost their self-confidence so that they can take on challenges with greater assurance, and overcome obstacles.
For executives and senior managers, individual in-company coaching can help them to :
- Working better under pressure
- Learning from failures
- Developing the flexibility to adapt to a continuous pace of change
- Communicate more effectively by working on your emotional and relational intelligence
- Develop your managerial posture to adapt your strategies to the strengths and weaknesses of your team
- Develop your leadership skills to better rally people around your vision
Coaching sessions are therefore a safe space where you can explore your challenges, identify your professional goals and develop a concrete action plan to achieve them. The benefits of this highly personalised and individualised support can be immediate, and can also continue to bear fruit over the years, from one job to the next, throughout a career.
The impact of team coaching
When economic and organisational difficulties multiply, leaders and management teams have a decisive role to play in staying the course, leading the way and being clear about the priority issues. When the going gets tough, the way the management team works together is crucial: how decisions are made efficientlyHow do we resolve the conflicts that inevitably arise during difficult times? How do we cultivate the potential for adaptation and resilience (for ourselves, for the organisation)? These are all issues that professional coaching can help to unblock.
Whereas consultants work on the "what to do", coaches work "on the dynamics and relationships, so as to encourage team members to maximise their abilities and potential to achieve their common goals" (International Coaching Federation):
- Taking a step back before taking action by asking yourself relevant questions
- Differentiating between systemic and individual issues within the company
- Mobilise collectively around a (new) joint project, by developing co-responsibility within the team
- Optimising team functioning and decision-making, particularly when the boundaries of the various players are turned upside down by a reorganisation.
Put another way, coaching facilitates the alignment of team and organisational objectives in a climate of trust - just as much as individual contributions.
Whether it's individual or group coaching, we've found that the people we coach :
- listen more effectively and actively
- have fewer limiting beliefs
- better mobilise their colleagues and professional partners
- adopt an approach to improvement that builds on the positive and the creative, rather than systematically focusing on "what's wrong" and "what's already been done".
When 1 + 1 = 3, the principle of the multiplier effect of coaching
In addition to the benefits felt by the coachees, there are also those generated (in)directly for the company. And this is where we can start talking about the multiplier effect of coaching.
The Palo Alto systemic approach
Rather than going into detail about this effect described by John Maynard Keynes, we will take a diversion through Palo Alto's systemic and strategic approach. We have a natural tendency to want to solve the problems we encounter. But when a solution doesn't work, our brain often has difficulty finding new ways of solving the problem. It is then tempted to do "more of the same", even when we suggest doing things differently. As a result, the solution becomes the problem, because we have persisted in trying to solve the problem with the same inadequate solution - a solution that may be considered "the right decision" in other contexts. With the systemic approach to coaching, the professional coach helps his clients to realise that they can change the "rules of the game" to find their own new and relevant solutions.
The multiplier effect of coaching
OK, but what does this have to do with the multiplier effect? With the systemic approach, coaching sessions enable the desired change to be visualised at a relational, interactional level. The person being coached learns to list their attempts at a solution, to make their beliefs explicit and to step back from the inadequate solutions they are using to resolve the problem. New strategies can then be developed to achieve specific objectives.
Finding the way back to a high-performance organisation means developing and maintaining effective interactions between everyone and aligning everyone with a common vision. What makes the difference is the quality of interpersonal relations within the company. For example, when a manager benefits from coaching, the members of his team also benefit from the development of his leadership posture and from the openness to new "rules of the game" that the manager brings to the organisation. People who have been coached effectively report increased psychological well-being, are more effective and tend to adopt a similar approach when coaching their team. So, even if the intervention is individual, coaching has a multiplier effect that encourages collaboration and collective intelligence within the team. These positive effects lead to greater job satisfaction, increased talent retention and an overall improvement in organisational culture.
Why do business coaching?
Let's mischievously paraphrase a Lotto slogan that was very popular in the 1980s: business coachingIt's easy, it's cheap and it can be very profitable!
The cost of business coaching
Is coaching expensive? No! Whatever the sector of activity, individual coaching generally takes around ten hours, and team coaching between ten and twenty hours. So it's a very low-cost investment compared with consultancy assignments, which in many medium-sized and large companies take several months to complete full-time.
It is also a low-cost investment compared with recruitment, for example if it is necessary to end a trial period and re-launch recruitment. On the other hand, support when the new employee takes up his or her post could have facilitated and accelerated the integration process.
Finally, coaching can also be financed from a Qualiopi training budget. Here again, there is no need for an additional budget line, whatever the type of coaching, simply allocate it to the training budget.
The risk of not not do business coaching
Developing your ability to convince, win, obtain, reap, succeed... thanks to the coaching process is fantastic! What's not so great is not investing in what is generally a company's main asset: its people! And to let the necessary skills within the teams deteriorate, to accept a decrease in efficiency due to a lack of development opportunities but also due to a weakness in leadership at all levels of the organisation, to observe a decrease in team satisfaction, and ultimately an increase in the turnover rate, leading to additional costs and a loss of productivity, and so on.
To put it another way, the opportunity cost of not encouraging employee development and skills enhancement, or of not optimising the smooth running of teams, is undoubtedly more worrying and more risky for the company than any alleged additional budgetary cost arising from a well-defined in-company coaching approach. And this is even truer in a context of restructuring, merger, acquisition, international growth, change of manager or redefinition of the corporate project, where uncertainty generates collective stress and where good decisions are rare.
How do you make the right choices for high-impact business coaching?
The business coaching sector is not yet regulated, which means that anyone can claim to be a coach. So how can you be sure that coaching will generate all the benefits mentioned above, and its "multiplier bonus"?
Choosing the right professional coaches
There are a number of factors that distinguish quality coaches from others who fail to create the space for reflection and the structure needed for the coachee to learn and develop. Here are a few ideas to increase the chances of choosing a good coach who will increase the opportunities to transform coaching into success for employees and managers. in fine for the company :
- Check the seriousness of the coaches by asking about the type of experience they have in business coaching, their training, their certifications (for example, the International Coaching Federation is respected throughout the world), the number of hours they have "flown" in coaching, the type of supervision they receive, etc.
- Favour coaches trained in the development of emotional intelligence and psychology, as they will have to deal with much more complex relational issues than in "business coaching" with a company director whose objectives are the commercial and financial development of his company.
- Meet several potential coaches before shortlisting two or three to introduce to the future coachee. In this way, there will be a better chance of finding a professional coach whose personality matches that of the coachee.
- Favour coaches who have developed an empirical approach over time rather than those who sell a single "off-the-shelf" methodology and pre-packaged "workshops".
- Look for coaches, such as those trained and certified by the ICF, who include the company in their coaching approach, with multi-party meetings beforehand and afterwards with all stakeholders (coachees, managers, Human Resources) in a progress-oriented approach.
In conclusion, coaching is not a magic solution. Unlike consultancy, which focuses on identifying the solution (there is a problem, what solution can we find?), coaching focuses on the relationships at work to help achieve the objective (what is blocking the relationships between the people concerned and preventing them from finding the solution?) Investing in coaching means helping to boost individual performance and encouraging strategies for transforming management culture. The positive effects of coaching in a professional environment are multiplied, in terms of personal and professional development, as well as on an individual and collective level.
In conclusion
coaching is not a magic solution. Unlike consulting, which focuses on identifying the solution (there is a problem, what solution can we find?), coaching focuses on the relationships at work to help achieve the objective (what is blocking the relationships between the people involved and preventing them from finding the solution?). Investing in coaching means helping to boost individual performance and encouraging strategies for transforming management culture. The positive effects of coaching in a professional environment are multiplied, in terms of personal and professional development, as well as on an individual and collective level.
