All of us have reached cul-de-sacs or dead ends in our professional or family lives. We know what we want is “out there,” but we’re boxed in and see no clear path forward. Or we were making progress toward our dreams but are now bogged down or feel like giving up.
This is the first of several articles on the overall theme of “The Transforming Power of Coaching for Christian Leaders.” Today and in future articles, I want to address each of the three key terms in this title:
- Transforming Power—is there evidence that coaching has genuine power to help us, especially when we are leaders?
- Coaching—what is coaching, anyway? And how it is different from mentoring?
- Christian leaders—while anyone can benefit from coaching, what special value does it offer to Christians and Christian leaders?
Today, I’ll focus on just the transforming power of coaching. Unless you are convinced that coaching offers great value to help you get moving to where you want to go, you will likely not be interested in learning more about it (#2 and #3).
What is a Coach?
“Coach” is used in multiple ways today: athletic coaches, life coaches, birth coaches, etc. Indeed, there are probably few skills or activities today to which someone has not already appended the word “coach.” In my next article, we’ll examine the coaching process and how it works in much greater detail.
However, to think about the transforming power of coaching, we need a mental picture of coaching.
Here are two definitions offered by the International Coach Federation, the largest coach credentialing organization in the world, with currently over 30,500 credentialed coaches in 138 countries:
Coaching: partnering with coachee(s) in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
Professional coach: someone who provides an ongoing partnership designed to help coachees produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources and creativity that the coachee already has.
At most basic, a coach is any person who engages a friend, family member or work associate to reflect on what they are doing with the goal of helping them grow. People who do this work professionally are especially dedicated to not “give answers” but rather help draw out and “enhance the skills, resources and creativity that the coachee already has.”
There has been a wealth of research on the impact of coaching in the last few decades. Here are a few glimpses of the tip of the iceberg.
Personal Coaching for Leaders of Non-Profit Organizations
Executive Directors of non-profit organizations were studied to determine the impact of having a personal coach on both their own organizational leadership and also the impact to their organizations. Since I am most interested in the benefits of coaching for Christian leaders, non-profits offer the closest parallel.
Here are a four key results. In each case a baseline (blue) of the averaged responses before coaching is compared to the post-coaching (red) responses.
First, non-profit leaders reported that personal coaching helped them markedly improve their relationships with staff members. This is likely due to the power of coaching to help individuals reflect honestly on their behavior and consider different ways forward. More on that when we talk about coaching itself.
Second, non-profit leaders also reported a marked increase in the effectiveness of their personal leadership, especially in two areas: when facing challenges and when faced with the need to achieve important goals.
Third, in addition to exercising leadership in critical situations, (e.g. facing challenges or achieving goals), non-profit leaders found that having a personal coach helped them dramatically increase the consistency of their leadership. In fact, they saw the tangible benefits of their exercise of leadership expand from about two-thirds of the time to literally every single day.
Finally, what about the value to the organizations led by these Executive Directors who received personal coaching? Two more statistics tell this tale:
Unlike for-profit companies where continuing to receive a salary is a prime motivation, a special challenge for non-profit leaders and church pastors is getting a large number of volunteers “on board” with the organization’s mission and vision. These non-profit leaders report that their staff/board’s alignment with the mission and a more clearly-defined vision were two significant impacts in their organizations from the personal coaching they received.
In summary, executive directors of non-profits listed the following benefits of having a professional personal coach:
- New insights into their strengths and weaknesses
- Improving their leadership and management skills
- Increasing their confidence in their ability to do their jobs well
- Better able to address personnel issues and delegate appropriately
- Work more effectively with their board of directors
- Improved communication with staff and board.
They also listed how their organizations benefited from their coaching experience:
- Increased financial stability
- Improved internal communications
- Improved ability to fulfill the organization’s mission and vision.
International Research on “Coaching Culture”
To assess the power of coaching we must look first to where it began and has been used most extensively—in business corporations, especially larger ones. (Sometimes the genesis of coaching in the business world makes it immediately suspect to Christian leaders; I will address this in the next article).
Many Fortune 500 corporations discovered the power of coaching several decades ago. Coaching has become a mainstay of their corporate life, with many of them utilizing three distinct types of coaching that overlap within their organizations:
- external coaches, who are often contracted to coach key executives.
- internal coaches ,whose job description includes part or full-time coaching of other staff.
- managers/leaders, who receive coaching skills training as one of many tools in their leadership tool kit.
Such organizations have created a “coaching culture” where coaching becomes the way they live out their life together.
Relationships up and down the organization from the CEO to the cleaning staff are influenced by a coaching mindset, such as a priority on listening before giving directions and asking good questions.
A good definition of coaching culture is a commitment to grow the organization embedded in a parallel commitment to grow the people in the organization
Fortunately, we now have excellent research on the success of coaching cultures. Since 2014, the International Coach Federation (ICF) has produced five annual in-depth studies on the impact of a coaching culture in organizations.
This ICF research is helpful because it includes not just North America or Europe, but nations across the world wherever credentialed coaches are at work. The results that follow are from the 2018 ICF research.
1) Transformational Power: Increased Engagement
To quote from the latest 2018 ICF Global Research report, 65% of employees rated themselves “highly engaged” in organizations with a strong coaching culture, whereas 52% rated themselves “highly engaged” in all other organizations.
Respondents highlighted increased engagement as the top outcome of coaching within their organization.
Faster on-boarding and leadership development are also cited as key outcomes, as are the more intangible results of increased emotional intelligence for employees and improved team functioning.
Engagement is critical to the success of any church or organization. Are the staff or volunteer members willing and eager participants because they have absorbed the organization’s values and are committed to its mission? Or do they give lip service when the bosses or pastors are listening but not really give much time, energy or money to the mission when on their own?
2) Transformational Power: Leadership Development
Does the organization have a revolving door with staff, leaders or members regularly coming and going? Or has the organization demonstrated that it is investing in the growth and well-being of its people so that they want to stay and make a long-term commitment? Are younger leaders being used up and thrown away, or are they being prepared or “groomed” to take on greater responsibility?
The ICF research goes on to assert:
Not only will such a coaching culture help to retain top employees and help prepare high-potentials for leadership positions, but it will also position the company as an employer of choice and enhance its ability to attract qualified, right-fit talent.
The company can convey its commitment to the ongoing development of its employees, helping to retain top talent and attract the best candidates who want to work for a company dedicated to their professional advancement.
3) Transformational Power: Increased Ability to Adapt and Change
In addition to the top benefits of greater engagement and improved leadership development, research shows that organizations with a strong coaching culture have marked improvement in teamwork, increased productivity and improved communication skills.
All of these benefits of a coaching culture (teamwork, productivity, communication skills) are foundational to perhaps the most critical of all ways coaching can serve modern organizations—the ability to change.
Ability to sustain change and adapt to changing circumstances begins within a coaching culture’s change of attitude within the executive leadership of an organization.
Most respondents agree that managers’ training requirements now have shifted to include a coaching skills component that was not required in the past.
Now, there is a stronger emphasis on managers using “soft skills,” such as empathy, to develop an employee as an individual, focusing on building employee strengths through a collaborative, problem-solving style of leadership.
Organizations now see coaching as a way to transform the top-down management approach into a more interactive, team-based mentality.
The “command and control” mentality and directive leadership styles in the 20th century are rapidly being replaced in the 21st century by much more collaborative, team-based mentalities.
As a coaching culture insures that all staff or volunteers feel listened to and valued, organizations are better equipped to adapt to the constantly changing conditions around them. This ability to adapt and change often determines which organizations thrive and grow and which ones decline and ultimately die.
The ICF research puts it this way:
Change is natural. It’s the fear of the unknown that causes us to push back.
If we use coaching to create a safe, supportive relationship where we can help people explore different possibilities and consider how making some of these changes help them achieve what’s most important to them, we can get them more invested in that change.
And there’s a greater chance they’re going to follow through and do the things they need to do to make the change.”
Here is the conclusion of five years of ICF research on coaching culture:
In the next article, we’ll investigate what coaching is and how it brings about such positive results in organizational life.
