Who benefits from coaching?
Text: Jari Jokinen Photos by: AJ Savolainen
Coaching is an efficient, individually targeted method that aims at better utilisation of a person’s or organisation’s skills.
Coaching is a relatively new development tool, particularly in Finland. It is still often perceived as a working method intended to help a problem-ridden leader see the light.
Coaching strives towards better achievement of strategic objectives and the optimal utilisation of know-how. It is also important to understand that the coach will not make any difficult decisions on behalf of the coachee or provide business advice.
At Psycon’s panel, Sami Venäläinen from Nokia Siemens Networks and Terhi Kivinen from Tamro discussed coaching with Jarmo Kankainen, Annastiina Mäki, Mari Blomqvist and Timo Kaukonen from Psycon. They tried to determine what coaching is and what criteria are used for it. It became clear from the outset that coaching is not for everyone. Coaching will succeed when the coachee has sufficient capacity and self-reflection capability, meaning that it is a demanding development method also for the coachee.
“In my opinion, coaching is particularly useful for people in leading positions, supervisors and change managers who promote significant changes in their organisation. In particular, members of the top management are often in a position where they have no one to speak with and there is nobody who dares say anything against them. The only persons expressing their opinions may be the spouse at home and the secretary or assistant at work,” says Sami Venäläinen, who has taken training on coaching and utilises it in his work in NSN’s global customer team. Venäläinen is responsible for the operational sales activities of France Telecom Orange Group.
“A person must be courageous enough to take on a project like this. Leadership is not something you can transfer,” Venäläinen adds.
At Tamro, coaching is not a completely new thing.
“We have been practising a coaching-oriented leadership approach for a couple of years and taken part in group coaching for supervisors. I received coaching training last autumn and am now utilising it in my work,” Terhi Kivinen says. She is responsible for Tamro Group’s communications and corporate responsibility.
The process begins by evaluating the initial situation and, if necessary, performing a 360° assessment, in which the coachee’s supervisor, colleagues and subordinates provide feedback on his or her performance. In coaching, the learning progresses from assessment to understanding, practical application and experiences. In the follow-up phase, the work and the implementation of the objectives are assessed.
The coaching process usually lasts something between a few months and about a year, and there are five to ten sessions, about 1–1.5 hours each. Coaching does not necessarily require face-to-face meetings.
“In my own work, I rarely meet the coachee in person. We mostly use the phone, since people work in different corners of the world,” Sami Venäläinen says.
Senior Consultant Timo Kaukonen from Psycon stresses that briefing the coachee and maintaining the right intensity are important in coaching, regardless of whether the session is by phone or face to face.
“The coach is responsible for the schedule and course of the session, but he or she must be able to react flexibly to the coachee’s situation. Good ideas sometimes take their time to come, and then you can leave out a theme that you had earlier agreed to address,” Senior Consultant Mari Blomqvist says.
Senior Consultant Annastiina Mäki sums up the starting points for successful coaching as mutual trust and good personal chemistry. The process is based on the coachee’s leadership situation and individual development needs as well as the organisation’s strategic objectives.
“In order for the process to yield results, expectations must be specified at the very beginning,” Mäki says.
In the U.S., Harvard Business Review conducted a survey among American and British coaches, and the results were published in 2009. Clearly the most common reason for people seeking coaching was to better utilise their development potential (48%); a quarter needed an external sparring partner and only 12 per cent sought help to deal with methods of operation they considered problematic.
“Coaching addresses key ideas,” Timo Kaukonen says.
According to Mari Blomqvist, coaching is mainly about development of the thinking process. When you get rid of routines or out of a rut, you also get results. Senior Advisor Jarmo Kankainen goes on to emphasise that while nobody can be told to think faster or better, there are often bottlenecks in the operations for which you can find new solutions.
Can coaching paid by the company also involve personal goals? According to HBR’s survey, companies only extremely rarely (3%) want the coach to deal with challenges in the coachee’s personal life. However, these may come up very strongly during the coaching. Coaching is not intended to work as therapy, even though the coach may have the training for this.
“The employer’s motivation for coaching is that while at the workplace, the person will focus his or her energy on working. It will of course be useful if the coaching helps tackle a personal problem. Evidently, if your personal life is not intact, it will affect your work input,” Sami Venäläinen notes.
It can be concluded from the panellists’ comments that if coaching helps people to, for example, improve their time management, this will be reflected in everything they do.
Both HBR’s survey and Psycon’s panel agreed that the greatest resistance to coaching is due to prejudices and problems in measuring its efficiency. Jarmo Kankainen notes that coaching may still be considered too soft a method from business management’s viewpoint.
“When selecting a development method, the company must consider who will benefit from coaching, how it will be bought, whom it will fit and whom not. And also, what it can achieve in relation to the time and money spent. The company must invest in measuring the benefits of coaching,” Kankainen says.
What can be achieved by means of coaching? According to Jarmo Kankainen, successful coaching is crystallised in the achievement of strategic objectives without having to rev the engine. It creates a culture of doing things more sensibly.