The phenomenon of ‘Executive Coaching’ and ‘Life Coaching’ is new in India and is gaining popularity with select people and organizations.

Executive coaching is slowly gaining popularity in India. On one side there are big corporate houses who prefer to engage big international brand names for coaching. On the other side, there are a number of coaches who take up assignments in coaching as independent consultants. This industry in India is largely an unorganized cottage industry. There are no standardization.

Most coaching assignments are sponsored by the organizations. Individuals who opt for ‘Whole Life Coaching’ who are self sponsored are small in numbers. Therefore, the whole dynamics of ‘inside out’ vs ‘outside in’ comes into play when the coaching relationship starts. Which means people think that someone is trying to fix them vs they voluntarily wanting to change. The role of the coach in such scenarios is to break the first mental barrier and reach the coachee, create a rapport to develop trust to create any worthwhile impact on the coachee’s behavior or performance. But this is easier said than done…

My first assignment in coaching started in 2005 when the HR Head of a client of mine, who is one of the leading Telecom Companies in India, called me and said that they are looking for some sustainable results in a particular business line to enhance ‘customer satisfaction levels’ of one of their divisions which is responsible for taking care of the ‘premium customers of theirs.

We met and devised an intervention which consisted of training and coaching of the entire team. Our hypothesis was that employee engagement leads to customer satisfaction. If we want to enhance the customer engagement we need to look at what is causing unhappiness to the employees and therefore the relationship of managers with their front line executives was critical in the process.

Our coaching process started with a group session, followed by one-o-one sessions with all the managers and stakeholders.

One of the things we observed was the feedback process in one-o-one meetings which was about giving ‘corrective feedback to all employees’ was based on all the mistakes they had made in the previous two weeks. We coached the team leaders to reverse this process and started a strengths based process. As a result, team leaders started focusing on the ‘success stories of the previous two weeks’ as opposed to the mistakes. The focus shifted from ‘learning from failures’ to ‘learning from success’. This enhanced the energy of the entire group, led to increased customer engagement and therefore higher customer satisfaction.

In our experience of years of individual coaching and group coaching, we have come across the following coaching scenarios specially with reference to organization sponsored coaching:

Behavioral Coaching – Fix it scenarios: Person is a good performer but his/her behavior is an issue with the team. He/she is not a good team player, does not cooperate and has some form of behavioral problems with colleagues, clients, peers etc. In these cases, the only reason organization wants to invest in the person is that he/she is highly skilled and is invaluable to the organization. Our interviews with coaches has revealed that they find these cases the most difficult ones. The reason being resistance in the person is very high and breaking the barrier to reach the person takes some time. Such people are usually very defensive and only after a rapport is formed between the coach and the coachee, the latter starts listening. This calls for patience from both the organization and the coach. In many cases, the organizations may give up mid way. However, when done diligently and with persistence, the results are phenomenal.
Also some times, where the person is an individual contributor, it may be a good idea to let him be and keep on working what he is best at instead of working on his/her ‘team skills’. We had one such case where the person was an extremely good deal maker and his contribution to the company was invaluable. However, he was not willing to follow the group norms of the company, his freedom was so important to him. Therefore, we advised the CEO to convert his employment contract to an ‘independent contract’. As a result he had much more freedom and he continued doing what he wanted to do and was best at without making any significant changes in his working style.

Performance coaching – ‘improve me’ scenarios: In such cases, employees will usually have some performance related developmental area that might relate to some skill development eg assertiveness, self management, planning, conflict management etc. Since the coaching is directly linked with the performance. the employees are motivated to change. The success of the contract depends upon ‘setting the stretch goals and ensuring the action plan is followed up consistently.

Coaching for Development – next level success: This kind of engagement is to give highly customized coaching to high profile individuals to get better at what they are doing, smoothen their rough edges and prepare them for the next level. When people are successful, it is very difficult to change them. Therefore, in case the organization wishes to develop a set of successful performers, this might seem like a lucrative assignment but is the hardest to implement. Since people think that they are successful because of who they are and they do not need to change. However, once the mutual rapport and the credibility of the coach is established in the coachee’s mind, the change starts happening.

Life Coaching: People usually sponsor themselves for ‘life coaching’ or career coaching when they are going through some career crisis or otherwise. Our research has found that all these self sponsored people are very open to learning, drop their guards very easily. One example is our open program in ‘building Appreciative leadership’ attracts people who are already using this methodology in some form of the other and they want to sharpen their skills further, they usually share very openly and are keen learners.

To summarize, some of our observations of coaching in India:
Executive coaching happens primarily through organization sponsored route. Very few individuals opt for ‘whole life coaching’ or psychotherapy voluntarily as a tool to develop themselves. There is a taboo around the whole notion of getting into any therapy as if no one wants to be labeled as ‘something is wrong with me’

People invest more in behavioral or performance coaching when they are faced with non-performance or negative feedback.

Interestingly, people who are open to learning and receiving are also open to coaching of any kind since they open their hearts to learning and receiving easily.

Therefore in all the cases, the critical piece is the trust between the coach and the coachee and once that is established, the change journey begins for both coach and the coachee…