Recommendations
- High Awareness of Coaching but relatively low application provides a huge opportunity for aspiring Business and Executive Coaches to build a significant practice
- High Inclination by respondents to bring in Coaching as an OD intervention facilitates low resistance entry and opportunity to communicate and demonstrate coaching benefits
- Demonstrate performance and process improvement through use of appropriate assessment tools ( before and after )
- Link Coaching Interventions to the Corporate Imperatives of the Organization
- Link Coaching Interventions with High Potential Employees and Succession Planning Issues
- Establish coaching efficacy through trial Coaching sessions and demonstrate benefit.
- Understand Coachability of the Organization and Coachee before taking on assignments.
- Most coaches focus on the subjective and qualitative. There is opportunity for a results-based, empirical evidence-driven coach who can drive behavioural change in organizations
- An Awareness campaign that details various coaching methodologies and benefits
- Target early adopter organizations
- Target fast growing companies in the Small and Medium Enterprise Segments ( Company sales $ 25 million - $ 200 million )
- Sensitising seminars and speaker opportunities with Business associations and Professional Networks
- The fragmented nature of the executive coaching industry in India poses many challenges both on the supply as well as the demand side.
- On the supply side, there is an absence of experienced coaches who understand and appreciate business complexity and ambiguity. Business and Executive Coaches need to have finer business wisdom as compared to what theoretical coaching model based methodologies provide.
- Coaches need to focus on improvement, change, and outcomes rather than merely “feel good” factor for the Coachee.
- On the demand side, there is a need to sensitize CEOs, CXOs and HR Heads on executive coaching and on what executive coaching can and cannot achieve. There is a need to educate them on the critical role that executive coaching can play in strengthening the leadership pipeline and change management.
Conclusions
The potential and opportunities for Business and Executive Coaching in India are huge. The role of executive coaches to impact the business world positively is great. However, the effectiveness of executive coaching needs to be qualified and clearly articulated to stakeholders and key decision makers.
In this paper, we reviewed several studies which investigated the impact of coaching and discussed what we can learn from the findings. Clearly, we can conclude that coaching works in most cases. Both, individual coachees and the organization benefit. While we cannot draw any firm conclusions with regard to ROI, the findings do reveal that coaching has a significantly positive effect. The extent of ROI and the extent of this positive impact are affected by several factors – the coachee, the coaching objectives, the coaching approach employed, the organizational support given to the initiative, and the expertise of the coach. Having said this, there appears to be a prevailing consensus that ROI is around 5.7 times the coaching investment. This is not insignificant!
Thus the opportunity to introduce Coaching as a key Organization Development intervention presents itself.
Finally, it needs to be emphasized that practitioners and scholars alike will benefit with a more scientific, careful evaluation of the executive coaching process. This needs to be done through a combination of education, awareness creation and interaction with the captains of business and industry at a personal level as also at relevant speaker forums and symposia.
Appendix
The Detailed Survey Questionnaire with responses are attached in the document below:
References
1.0 HBR Research Report
The Realities of Executive Coaching – Carol Kauffman and Diane Coutu
2.0 Korn Ferry Institute
The Effectiveness of Executive Coaching - By Kenneth P. De Meuse and Gaugrong Dai
3.0 Executive Coaching in India – Paper presented by JK Organization – TJ Insite Reports