The Managerial Culture
When it comes to the way expertise is received in the managerial culture, the focus turned not from the source of the expertise, but from its demonstrated (and proven) outcomes. The advice of an expert receives attention if this expert has a track record of successful advice or prediction. This is an output/outcome base measure of expert credibility. “Show me what you’ve done.” Trust is based on demonstrated competence. The demonstration, in turn, must usually be quantitative in nature and aligned with the specific desired goals and outcomes identified by the person or group receiving the expert advice. “If you can’t measure it, then how do I know that you are telling me the ‘truth’?)
The ways in which coaches operate in the managerial culture is directly aligned with this emphasis on outcomes and measurement. With regard to outcomes, coaches and the users of coaching services who are aligned with this culture conceive of coaching as a vehicle for the improvement of managerial performances. Management, in turn, is often identified with a specific set of organizational functions and responsibilities. Viewing management from a professional culture orientation, Warren Bennis (1989), suggests that managers administer, ask how and when, focus on systems, do things right, maintain, rely on control, and have a short-term perspective. Bennis also suggests that managers tend to accept the status-quo, have an eye on the bottom line and imitate. They are the classic good soldier and are a copy. Given Bennis’s limiting perspective on management, the role to be played by coaches becomes quite clear. They are to assist managers in performing these organizational functions.
Many definitions of coaching from the late 1970s through the 2000s are oriented toward the management culture. Coaching is seen quite widely as a vehicle for improved managerial performance. Coaches aligned with this culture are often engaged in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of a manager’s work—this work being directed toward specified goals and purposes. They often perceive few, if any differences, between management and leadership. Those aligned with this culture tend to value fiscal responsibility and the quantifiable measurement of coaching outcomes (for example, Return-on-Investment). They tend to believe that management (and therefore leadership) skills can be specified and developed through a blend of training and coaching.
These programs, in turn, are founded on a basis of expertise that is results-driven. A solid proposal offered by a management development firm should be based on a program that not only includes both training and follow up coaching, but also has been shown to produce measurable improvement in performance. A return-on-investment measurement such as offered by Jack and Patti Phillips (2015) is “icing-on-the-cake” for members of the managerial culture—for coaches who associate with this culture often embrace many untested assumptions about the capacity of an organization’s managers (leaders) to clearly define and measure its goals, objectives and “investments” (both fiscal and nonfiscal). They conceive of the coaching enterprise as the inculcation or reinforcement of specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the men and women they are coaching, so that they might become successful and responsible managers (leaders).
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