Interview with Carol Braddick and John Bennett

Citation

by Ruth Young, I. (2009), "Interview with Carol Braddick and John Bennett", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2009.04417aaf.001

Interview with Carol Braddick and John Bennett

Article Type: Interview with Carol Braddick and John Bennett From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 17, Issue 1

Interview by Ruth Young

Coaching is an increasingly popular option as a learning and development tool within organizations, but there can be a baffling array of approaches and a number of factors to consider when deciding on implementation. Here Carol Braddick and John Bennett share their views and expertise on the best way forward.

Carol works as an Executive Coach and OD consultant through the Graham Braddick Partnership. She has worked with the CIPD on several coaching initiatives such as its tool kit Managing External Coaches: Practical Tips for HR. She also worked with Executive Development Associates’ study of executive coaching at blue chip companies. This research has recently been published as Executive Coaching for Results: The Definitive Guide to Developing Organizational Leaders (McGraw Hill). Carol has worked in the field of people and organizational development for over 20 years, including with global firms such as Hewitt and Towers Perrin. She has a Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Linguistics from Pomona College in Claremont, California. She received her MBA in Finance from New York University. Originally from New York, Carol has also lived and worked in Latin America.

John L. Bennett, PhD is Assistant Professor in the McColl School of Business at Queens University of Charlotte (NC, USA) where he teaches graduate courses in coaching and organization development. He is also Senior Vice President, Talent Solutions Director for Lee Hecht Harrison a global talent solutions company. John has more than 25 years of progressively challenging and successful experience in creating, leading, and being a part of change in various industries. He serves as a Senior Advisor to The Foundation of Coaching (a project of the Harnisch Foundation) and is a member of the advisory board for the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations. He is a practicing executive coach, talent solutions practice leader, frequent speaker, and author. John earned the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential through the International Coach Federation. His research interests include the influence of lived-experience on the work of scholar-practitioners, professionalization of coaching, and executive coaching readiness. John L. Bennett can be contacted at: john.bennett@lhh.com

First, could you tell me about some of the ways coaching might be used within organizations?

John: Coaching is an intervention that helps in the development process, in the learning and growth and development of leaders at all levels in organizations, whether they have a formal leadership role or not. And that might be done in a one-on-one arrangement or it might be done in a group arrangement, so that the individual has the opportunity to first of all start out with an increased level and sense of awareness about themselves and how they appear and what the opportunities are for possibly making some shifts in their own behaviors and then moving from a level of awareness to a level of acceptance. So often we are aware of things but not willing to accept them, whether that is in our communications with others, in building relationships in the workplace or in thinking and acting more strategically. Once that level of awareness and acceptance takes place then a behavior shift can begin and that behavior shift is really the focus of coaching.

Carol: I think it is useful to think of coaching in terms of a process so that people’s expectations are set in terms of the amount of time they may need to invest in coaching and the conditions that make coaching successful. There are number of players in the process; the coach, the coachee, the manager of the coachee, HR; these players take on their roles in a complex system. Coaching can be delivered in a number of different ways: by internal coaches, managers, HR, peers, so who is in the role of coach may vary. But the common element is that through coaching we are looking to make some kind of shift in behavior, in leadership style, in mindset, in self-awareness and skill-level. And part of the coaching contract is to try to get quite specific about exactly what kind of shift you’re looking for and why that would be valuable to the individual and to the organization.

So coaching could never really be considered as a “quick fix” option in terms of learning and development. Is it always about taking time to develop a particular culture?

John: I think it is both; some of my most powerful interactions with someone that I have coached, and also when working with a coach, have been those “in the moment” opportunities. In corporate settings I often refer to those types of moments as “watercooler-coaching”. The idea of what happens in the moment, in coincidental experiences where someone asks us the question and we get a new insight or a new awareness that allows us to make that behavior shift. So it can be in the moment, and it can be in a much more planned, longer term relationship perhaps with an Executive Coach.

Do you think a variety of coaching approaches could be appropriate across an organization or do you think a focus on one particular type is preferable?

Carol: I think a variety of approaches could be quite complementary. I have worked with companies where all of the different delivery mechanisms I mentioned earlier are in place: external coaches are working with executives on very specific, well-managed assignments, managers are very active coaches of the people that work for them, an HR business partner also contributes as an internal coach. And the challenge there I think is to join those up and to be clear about the shift you are trying to facilitate.

John: Coaching can occur at all levels within an organization using both internal and external resources. In a pressured and complex workplace environment where the pace of change is rapidly increasing and we are faced with demographic changes and a shortage of skilled labor in the future, coaching opportunities and the ability to make shifts ourselves becomes even more relevant. So coaching can occur via a manager who uses a coaching skills set, it does not have to be by someone who is designated as the coach and I think that is one of the roles that effective managers and leaders have to play even more today than they may have in the past.

You mention the concept of the coach-manager as one approach; with increasing workloads and time pressures there may be some reluctance on the part of managers to go down this route. How would you sell the coach-manager role to a reluctant manager?

Carol: I think one of the selling points is that a manager is in the best position to observe that individual and his or her impact within the organization. They have those moments, John mentioned earlier, in which to coach and build awareness, because they see the behavior others directly experience. So as a manager they really are in the most natural and authentic position to give feedback. I think the manager in many ways is in a more advantageous position and a more natural position than the external coach to be doing that. Giving feedback and coaching often get muddled. Many managers avoid coaching because they think they are being asked to spend lots of time with an employee to help them change but their company may simply be asking them to give feedback more frequently and with more specifics.

Organizations are increasingly concerned with return on investment from development programs. What is the response to this for coaching?

Carol: I think there are a number of ways to measure outcomes from coaching and development programs. ROI is just one of many methods and approaches and it seems to get an extraordinary amount of attention – to an unhelpful degree. If an organization values certain behaviors and believes that they are inherently useful for their culture and there is research that supports that those types of behaviors are associated with successful companies then I would certainly push back on trying to quantify ROI for coaching or a program that is designed to help build some of those behaviors. I’d question if they actually believe in the importance of these behaviors if they also need to do a financial study of an ROI. There are a number of studies out there already on ROI and so there are already some reference points that companies can point to. So I would actually question the value of repeating those kinds of studies internally. In terms of employee engagement, which is increasingly associated with more successful companies, if you look at the behaviors that help to build engagement, what types of experiences people have with their managers, their colleagues and the culture of their company that leads them to feel engaged, coaching can impact many of those behaviors and can help create, replicate and make those experiences more typical of the company. And I think that is where you see a chain of impact that is clear, that is credible and that tells a richer story about what coaching can do than ROI.

John: And a couple of points I would add to that. One is that I am always reminded of a colleague who was setting up a coaching program using very sophisticated processes and a great deal of resources, internal and external, throughout a very large financial institution. She had been coaching the Chief Financial Officer for a while before this program was launched. She sat down with the Chief Financial Officer and said, “I know you are going to ask me the question at some point, what is the measure of our success in terms of ROI?” the Chief Financial Officer said, “I know this works, I have been experiencing it, let’s not get caught up in trying to track all the cost and ROI, I know it works”. Now that may not be true in every situation, we always have to make wise business decisions in business settings, but I think what Carol is saying is that the measures of success extend beyond financial returns, the ones that can be quantified, or easily quantified. There is a softness around coaching as an intervention as there is in most leadership development and human capital kinds of development work, but I think it is not just a return on the financial investment, there is a return on the involvement from the individual that is being engaged.