Coaching can make trainers raise their game

FT.com

September 2, 2013 5:01 pm

By Philip Delves Broughton

For anything requiring intellectual or emotional sophistication, corporate ‘training’ is easy meat for the eye-rollers

Bill Campbell is probably too sensible to jeopardise his position in the technology sector by writing a book. But there is no guide to management I would rather read.

His career began far from Silicon Valley, coaching American football at Boston College and Columbia University. At the age of 38, he switched to business. He was a sales executive and marketer at Apple, chief executive of the software maker Intuit, and for many years has advised top executives at Apple, Google and scores of venture-backed companies. He is known in his industry as “Coach”.

Mr Campbell persuades managers to focus on the essential. He advises concentrating resources on a limited set of goals, and treating employees with dignity, especially in times of difficulty. He has witnessed most of the developments that can occur in his field, and can draw on a thick playbook of situations.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was Mr Campbell he turned to for long, ruminative Sunday morning walks around the streets of Palo Alto. It was Mr Campbell who sat with Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt, to create a unique organisation with engineers front and centre. Business is awash with executive coaches, but there is only one Coach.

If there were some way of replicating Mr Campbell and offering his services at scale it would crack one of the hardest problems managers face: the growing demand for coaching over training.

The corporate training industry has only itself to blame for its reputation. “Training” has come to denote whiteboard lists and cringe-inducing icebreaker exercises. It is useful in teaching new or rote skills that employees will use regularly. But for anything requiring intellectual or emotional sophistication it is easy meat for the eye-rollers. Neal Rackham, creator of the Solution Selling method, once analysed the effectiveness of sales training at Xerox and found that after 30 days employees had lost up to 87 per cent of their new skills.

Coaches, on the other hand, live in the trenches with those they are trying to help, offering very particular and specific advice. Coaching can occur infrequently, during quarterly performance reviews, but ideally it happens in real time. A managerial coach is there at an employee’s shoulder, asking questions and offering observations as she gropes through live business situations.

Atul Gawande, a surgeon, Harvard professor and author, believes the need for coaching increases with the complexity of a task. He uses a coach – a retired surgeon who sits in on his operations observing and taking notes – to improve his skills when he feels they have levelled out.

Coaches can break down a task into its parts and find ways to improve how you do each one. John Wooden, a relentlessly winning American college basketball coach in the 1960s and 1970s, would spend the first day of each season teaching his players how to put their socks on. If you did it properly, you got fewer blisters and missed fewer practices and games. Such small things, he felt, were the seeds of success.

In their new book, The Effortless Experience , Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi argue that customer service and sales managers need to coach, not train. Coaching is ongoing and bespoke, it involves the willing participation of both coach and pupil, and focuses on improvement. It can also be very quick – a probing question or word of advice delivered at the right time.

Service reps and salespeople do much better, the authors found, when consistently coached. These are not the kinds of employees who have traditionally been thought to justify the high level of investment implied by coaching. But coaching them has two connected effects. It makes employees work more effectively and it forces managers to scrutinise operations in detail, where they will discover lots of small opportunities for improvement that were otherwise invisible

If this all sounds like a lot of work, it is. It places another demand on already beleaguered managers. It requires them to reorder how they spend their time. And not all will be as good as Mr Campbell. But if the coaching fad forces the training industry to up its game, it will have served a useful purpose.

philip@philipdelvesbroughton.com

The writer is the author of ‘Life’s a pitch: What the world’s best sales people can teach us all’