As with any major programme, this must have buy-in at the highest level.  If the coaches are executives, already on the board, the Chairman and CEO must be prepared to commit time as well as money to the project.  It will require their input, individual feedback and commitment as mentors for the full duration of the programme (and beyond).  They should be tied into the results which have been agreed by any other sponsor, e.g. from HR.  If the executive coaches report to the board, the same applies, and their board sponsors (usually their line manager) must be committed to the aims and objectives.

The notion that Executive Coaching is just therapy in a more acceptable guise must be dispelled.  It is not just a remedial intervention, but generally one reserved for the people you most value and want to recognise, reward and retain.

Do you prefer to restrict (and ration) this approach as your ‘Rolls Royce’ development intervention for a very selective group or make it more accessible to a wider range of individuals but on a more restricted basis?  Are you looking for coaching, mentoring, executive/leadership training or just-in-time consulting?  While there is some overlap between all these, it is wise to be clear of the differences.  Coaching, in its purest form, will not assume that the coach imparts any particular expert knowledge, but rather is guardian to and facilitator of the coachee’s own learning process.  The other roles assume that some form of expert knowledge is imparted.  If it’s an ‘expert’ consultant you are looking for then you may wish to look outside your organisation.

Love them or loathe them, competencies are very often the foundation stones of large corporate human resource development (HRD) programmes.  The best competency frameworks are simple, widely accepted and workable; the worst are over-complex and sit in large binders on the bookshelf.  If you have a good framework, this is probably the best platform to consider using for the programme.  If you don’t, and wish to develop a framework, consult with an expert in this area who can help you get there quickly.  If you haven’t already developed strong vision and values statements, now is the time to do it and use this as the basis for your framework.  If you are proceeding with an executive coaching programme without in-house competencies, fine - there are plenty of generic leadership competency frameworks with their own assessment methodologies you could consider using.  Otherwise, you would need to consider using your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and recent appraisals as a means of evaluation and/or link to the outcomes of some measurable performance improvement projects.

One size doesn’t fit all.  There is a wide range of different routes to becoming a professional coach and the coach’s approach will be very much determined by their own professional experience, education and training (all fairly easy to check out) as well as their values, philosophy and inner wisdom gained through their own life experience (much harder to check out).  Coaches will generally have come to the profession (and yes, for the best coaches, it is a specific profession, not just an ‘add-on’ consulting service), from one of the following routes:  therapy/counselling (many, many different approaches just to this); consultancy (especially OD or HR consultancy); leadership training and development; occupational psychology; business coaching; specific personal development/training skills such as NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) - which is becoming quite a vogue in itself.  This can be quite a bewildering array of choices for the sponsor of an executive coaching programme who comes to this cold, especially if they have had no specialist psychological training themselves.  If this is how it feels, ask for some further advice from an objective expert on what approach would be best for your people before entering into any one commitment.

Many companies embarking on new initiatives, can be tempted to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’, disregarding some of the good work which has been done elsewhere.  This can be confusing to employees at all levels and may at worst give the impression that the new initiative may just be ‘another HR fad’, shortly to be abandoned when the next good idea comes along.  Instead consider how the new (coaching) initiative fits with other strategic change and HRD programmes and use it to help deliver and support other plans, e.g. culture and attitude change; organisational restructuring; assessment, selection and retention campaigns.  This is where a coach who has a good background in OD/HR might be the best fit for your programme.  Do make sure that your coach(es) get a really in-depth briefing which allows them to put their coachees’ development needs in the larger organisational context and allows them to see the business issues through eyes other than their client’s as well...

Once you have got informed on the different coach approaches (Step 3), you will be in a position to proceed to select your coach(es).  Should you turn to one of the larger, market-leading firms to one or more independent coaches as providers of the service?  There are pluses and minuses of both of course.  A larger firm may provide a more consistent approach if you want a more standardised offering for several people.  They may also have greater back-up and resources.  However, the approach might be slightly more prescriptive/standardised and less flexible.  Independents, on the other hand might be more flexible and accommodating to your needs, provide high commitment and good quality coaching, but you will need to provide the consistency in group briefings and feedback sessions which can be very useful for both sides.  Most independents are also part of larger networks and are in a position to offer back-up resources in this way. 

One of the best places to search for such coaches is through the International Coach Federation (http://www.coachfederation.org) which provides a credentialing and accreditation process for coaches.  The ICF is gaining increasing influence and is helping to provide a consistent voice for the profession as well as a commitment from its members to abide by a code of conduct.  Whoever you are considering appointing, do ask for references and confidential case studies and some individual as well as corporate clients who are willing to speak about the coach’s style and approach and, ideally, the benefits of having worked with them.

You need to decide how you will do this from the outset. Will you invite selected individuals discreetly to have a coach (depending on your perception of their requirements and the benefits to be derived from coaching) and let the results and word of mouth attract further candidates?  Or will you announce and market the programme and then select the ‘successful applicants’ to be sponsored to proceed?  One of the writer’s largest clients embarked on the first approach for Year 1 of their programme and it attracted so much interest for Year 2 that a more stringent selection process was agreed upon going forward.  This has involved the coach at the earliest stages in helping to evaluate and select the individuals who will gain most benefit. 

Remember that whichever coachees you select for the launch programme, this will tend to colour perceptions going forward.  If you select all ‘super stars’, it will have huge kudos and value as part of a benefits package and as a positive message to others of their worth, whilst those de-selected will receive a quite different message.  If you select all ‘problem children’ the reverse will be true – and without good pre-selection some of these might not be very coachable either.  Probably a good strategy (and interesting work for the coach) is a mix of both.  Let the results decide the benefits to the individuals and the organisation for future selections.

You will have decided the basis on which you wish to evaluate your key people (Step 3) and have agreed what competency framework (if any) you are going to work with.  You will now be able to work with your coach to agree how your executives should be assessed against these.  Some clients wish to run a full, rigorous development centre prior to coaching, either on a one-to-one or group basis.  This might involve psychometric assessment (usually factor-based), ability tests, competency-based interview, leadership or communication styles assessment, and almost certainly some form of 360-degree feedback.  You might as part of the contract want a full, integrated report produced based on this evidence (in which case a coach with a background in occupational psychology would be a particularly good choice and where consistency of approach if you have several coaches is critical).  However, if you believe that this amount of data and feedback might be overkill and the executives will have relatively current, valid feedback from recent assessments, we would still recommend that you commission some up-to-date assessments - at least a 360-degree feedback (ideally based on your competencies, if you have them) as well as some basic assessments to give insight into Values, Interests and Attitudes as well as Behavioural Styles.  These sorts of assessments are very easily administered over the Internet and need not add a great amount to your budget.

We're not just talking about more office parties.  You might think this applies much more to business-to-consumer, call-centre type operations, peopled with twenty-somethings rather than to professional or large corporate environments.  But 'professional' doesn't have to be synonymous with 'boring' and the more ways you can find to relate to people at a human level, to be able to empathise and support them in their lows and celebrate with them in their highs, the stronger will be the sense of Community which will bind your organisation together.  Conferences, 'away-days' and formal team-building activities are vital, but don't forget the informal celebrations and fun activities which might lighten the mood, especially during tough times.  Don't prescribe what this means, ask the teams and they will tell you what means most to them, whether football, fashion or fish n' chips.

Now you’re ready to roll!  Depending on the contract you have agreed with your coach, you can expect little or no further intervention between your selected coach(es) and their executive clients.  They will usually meet face-to-face on a monthly basis for as long as you have agreed, anything between 6 and 12 months (or longer, see Step 10).  This might be supplemented by telephone coaching either on a pre-agreed or on an ‘as-needs’ basis and an exchange of emails.  Pure telephone coaching can be very efficient and is gaining greater acceptance with clients, but the writer’s experience is that this is rarely a complete substitute for face-to-face contact.  One issue to be clear about is who is responsible for chasing the other down for their monthly sessions?  What is the policy about cancelled or postponed sessions?

But probably the most important and sometimes most difficult issue to resolve is that of boundaries and confidentiality.  There needs to be total and absolute trust between coach and client in every type of coaching relationship.  Yet the coach has two clients, the individual and the corporate sponsor, and it requires the utmost integrity to handle these both correctly at the boundaries.  The corporate client is owed some feedback in terms of how the programme and the relationship is working, so ideally the coachee him or herself should be encouraged to give as much feedback as they are comfortable with back to the sponsor.  They should not be obliged to divulge detail of the conversations, but may wish to give an outline of the agenda/key issues and certainly advise if the coach’s style approach is working for them.  If it clearly isn’t, carefully consider whether or not another coach might be better in this instance.  If strategically sensitive issues are divulged during a session, the coach must observe complete confidentiality, unless they ask for and freely receive explicit permission from the coachee to feed information back.  The coach, if working with several executives, may however feel free to report back trends which they perceive from the coaching, e.g. very aggressive head-hunters operating in their territory, huge shifts in morale due to policy change etc.

At the formal end of the programme, there needs to be a pre-agreed sign off.  This serves two main purposes.  Firstly it will give the opportunity to evaluate the benefits of the programme against the pre-agreed criteria.  For this purpose, it is especially useful for a programme of longer duration (12 months) to re-run initial assessments such as 360-degree feedback to ascertain just what the progress has been both quantitatively and qualitatively.  You may also wish to establish the outcomes (ideally bottom-line benefit) of any specific projects that were agreed as part of the coaching programme.   Secondly, it gives an opportunity for the coach and coachee to establish some closure in their relationship, which can, due to the closeness of a good quality coaching relationship, be just as hard for the coach as for the coachee.  Having said this, completely ending a good relationship, once established, may not make economic sense and may not be deriving the best return from your initial investment.  Most coaches would agree to continuing the relationship on an ‘as-needs’ basis on some form of retainer.  Whilst this should not reinforce any form of dependency, it should provide a hugely valuable safety valve and informed listening ear in the midst of any future crisis or dilemma.  Executive coaching may actually make your people a more valuable asset to be poached and who better to come to for advice but someone who is both committed to the individual as well as their organisation and who can help steer them towards the right career decision?

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