Ten Trends Driving Organizational Coaching

3. Coaching becomes a key leadership
competency

Ask people to describe the best leader they’ve ever had and you’ll hear comments like: “She’s a great listener. He asks a lot of questions. There’s authenticity. You walk away feeling like you’ve been heard, so that even if you disagree with the ultimate decision, you can support it.”

Coaching skills are being recognized widely as leadership skills. The old top-down, command-and-control management style of yesteryear is giving way to a more collaborative, interactive style of leading that utilizes coaching skills.

DDI defines managing as time spent planning and doing administrative tasks, and interacting as engaging in coach-like conversations. In surveys, leaders/managers estimate spending 41% of their work time managing, and nearly 20% of their time coaching. Given a preference, they would flip those numbers – doubling the amount of time they spend interacting with employees, and halving the time they spend managing them.

The term manager-coach is now in common use. The Conference Board defines a manager-coach as “a leader who works with his or her subordinates within the organization to create awareness and support behavior change [using] coaching knowledge, approaches, and skills.”

More organizations than ever now expect their leaders to coach their people effectively. In a 2015 ICF/HCI survey, 84% of respondents said that coaching is part of a manager/leader’s job – up 2% from the previous year.

Still, most leaders lack core coaching skills.

DDI has evaluated thousands of leaders in simulated work environments to assess their proficiency in such coaching competencies as active listening, responding with empathy, building trust, and providing support without removing responsibility from the coachee. The result: fewer than one in three leaders displays high proficiency in those areas. [DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2014/15]

Not surprisingly, this gap leads to the next emerging trend…