Coaching

The OUBS has been recruiting tutors for its new MBA foundation course, and requires tutors that not only have business knowledge but also recent experience of coaching managers, so the coaching industry is growing, growing so rapidly that Henley now offers an MSc in coaching and behavioural change. It's an MSc course that includes a module on neuro linguistic programming.

Whilst on an NLP course recently, I've met, worked and conversed with people who are following this coaching MSc. They tell me there are all sorts of coaches including life coaches, leadership coaches, executive coaches and even gestalt coaches. Because of the coach's need to know the limits of his/her abilities, the Henley students have to write assignments on differences between coaching, counselling and therapy and I don't know how well they have to assess their alliances with their coachees and how effective the coachee consequently becomes. How do you assess the effectiveness of coaching?

On last week's (8th July) The Bottom Line, discussed working with people you don't like. One of the guests, John Atkin, chief operating officer of Syngenta, denied ever working with people he didn't like, and another suggested using coaches for senior workers to do 360 evaluations - a long process to tell the boss "actually you're not behaving very nicely". But will coaching always produce the outcome you want?

Coachees' self-efficacy is the topic of a paper to be presented at the up-coming Academy of Management conference. The presenters (Baron, Morin & Morin) find that coachees who worked with a coach who overestimated the working alliance, experienced less growth in self-efficacy than coachees who work with a coach who either accurately estimated or underestimated the working alliance. It seems to me that finding suggests

• coaches have moral and ethical responsibility for their behaviour
• organisations that use coaches must be aware of the conditions under which coaching works