Executive-focused coaching grows in popularity

Ariadna Masip Pablo, a logistics training manager at Volkswagen Group España Distribución, had a plan to reinvigorate the roles of her team of customer service agents for Spanish VW and Audi dealerships.

The group’s primary task had become limited to one (rather dull) duty: booking dealership teams on to training programmes. Masip Pablo felt their jobs could be made more productive, and more interesting, by instead getting them to make better use of the data they held on dealership performance to start a conversation with the dealership teams about how they could change their existing practices to work better.

The problem was that Masip Pablo had doubts about her ability to lead this change process. She felt she needed a coach. So she enrolled on a course run by UPF Barcelona School of Management, where coaching came as part of the curriculum.

“The ideas were inside me but it was someone else who drew them out of me and encouraged me to apply them,” Masip Pablo says.

“With a coach, I had a safe space where I could talk about my concerns and be listened to without any distractions or danger of misinterpretation.”

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Coaching is having a moment in executive leadership circles, and business schools are adapting their executive education programmes to meet the demand by including coaching in more of their short courses and part-time study sessions.

Coaching is now the third most important career service sought by prospective business school students, according to Tomorrow’s MBA, a report by business school research group CarringtonCrisp. Only the traditional HR support services of career development classes and skills assessments were more popular in CarringtonCrisp’s survey.

Sue Dopson, a professor of organisational behaviour at Oxford Saïd Business School, describes herself as “heavily engaged” in coaching for her institution’s executive education students, having been involved in setting up Oxford’s coaching community more than a decade ago.

“We stumbled on coaching before it became fashionable,” Dopson says, noting that the school’s coaching programme was an evolution from the Oxford tradition of teaching through tutorials.

“Demand is particularly strong from our customised course clients. Often they want time to reflect on material in their courses. It has become about learning to be leaders.”

Good coaching provides executives with the space to examine the leadership challenges of their jobs, Dopson adds. “It is not about providing answers but asking the right questions.”

A separate CarringtonCrisp study involving about 10,000 executive education students from 1,100 organisations found 71 per cent believed that individual coaching was now a key element of turning classroom learning into action.

Just under half of the organisations interviewed for that study had used coaching to support their staff in the past two years and two-thirds of the students said coaching was either very or extremely valuable to maintain and grow the impact of their business school training.

Aránzazu Narbona, academic director at Esade Executive Education in Spain, says her team are increasingly being asked to complement executive training with coaching as a form of personal development.

This may reflect a broader trend: the growing importance of personal wellbeing in leadership roles, according to Narbona. “There is the sense that, in today’s turbulent environment, simply updating management knowledge is no longer enough to meet the challenges ahead,” Narbona says.

Amal Al-Abduljabbar, general manager for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture in Riyadh, put her team through a year long part-time programme at HEC Paris that leaned heavily on coaching to help build their communication and empathy skills.

“I wanted a programme that would help us to reflect on ourselves more, to learn more about ourselves,” she says. “It didn’t just affect the way we worked together, however — a lot of us found it also helped improve our personal relationships with our families. I am calmer now in how I deal with things both at home as well as in the office.”

Al-Abduljabbar and other members of her team signed up for additional coaching sessions when the course finished.

The typical audience for individual coaching sessions is senior executives who are navigating very complex environments and who may find that being at the top can be lonely at times. But, in business schools, executive coaching is increasingly seen as a tool for career advancement.

Participants who experience structured peer-to-peer coaching often continue applying these techniques afterwards, reaching out to their peers for advice and support

Barbara Stöttinger, dean of Executive Education at HEC Paris, says many executive education students are already familiar with coaching and so are more open to sharing their challenges in this way, making it easier to add such methods into a more conventional leadership training curriculum.

The benefits of coaching can extend well beyond the sessions in class, according to Stöttinger. “Participants who experience structured peer-to-peer coaching often continue applying these techniques afterwards, reaching out to their peers for advice and support.”

Konstantin Korotov, a professor of organisational behaviour at ESMT Berlin, has spent the past two decades researching leadership development and executive coaching, both in academic and corporate settings.

The rise of artificial intelligence has been good for developing practice scenarios (“tough conversations”) in coaching sessions, according to Korotov.

But he warns that the technology also risks creating a “McDonaldisation” of coaching techniques, in which they become scalable but shallow.

There is now also a risk of dependency on coaches, Korotov warns. “Leaders may start outsourcing decision-making too easily to these third party professionals,” he says.

“There is always a question of boundaries and how far a coach can go.”