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Leadership Coaching Comes
of Age
The February
21, 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine contains a five-page
story on executive coaching. The title of the article is "So
you’re a player: Do you need a coach?" The article
goes on to comment, "The hottest thing in management is
the executive coach - part boss, part consultant, and part therapist.
Who are these people? And what are they doing in your company?"
The following is an excerpt from the article.
" Corporate coaching is one
of the stranger wrinkles in management these days - one of the
hottest things in human resources, except that it does not usually
come out of human resources. (In fact HR is often the last to
know.) It is a grass roots movement that is spreading across
America… Coaches are everywhere these days. Companies hire
them to shore up executives or, in some cases, to ship them
out. Division heads hire them as change agents. Workers at all
levels of the corporate ladder, fed up with the lack of advice
from inside the company, are taking matters into their own hands
and enlisting coaches for guidance on how to improve their performance,
boost their profits, and make better decisions about everything
from personnel to strategy.
It’s not that executive coaching is particularly new. Chief
executives and those approaching the top have long sought counsel
from personal consultants, wise board members, or industrial
psychologists. But, in the last five years, coaching has gone
mass market… If ever stressed-out corporate America could
use a little couch time, it’s now. Trust in big companies
is at an all time low. Baby boomers have been burned. Gen Xers
aren’t expecting the corporation to take care of them.
Coaching in its present form began in the 1980s when some of
these trends were just beginning to take shape. But right now,
coaches are so hot that credentials are almost beside the point.
Corporate coaches are in such demand that they can charge from
$600 to $2,000 a month for three or four 30-60 minute phone
conversations. Some charge as much as $400 per hour…
Another way to look at the spread of coaching is that it bridges
the growing chasm between what managers are being asked to do
and what they have been trained to do. It is almost like the
difference between generals in peacetime and generals in war."
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