Well, according to the research undertaken by National Training Laboratories (NTL) Institute, one of the organisations associated with establishing OD as a professional field, not only coaching is applicable in OD work but essentially today leadership and executive coaching has emerged within OD (Minahan, 2006) and as early as by 1960s became ‘a central part of a good OD’ practice. The question, however, is whether the predominately executive and leadership coaching still suffice for the transformational goals of future organisations? Or are there further areas and wider target groups that coaching should address?
To see how much is coaching really ‘central’ when it comes to addressing the modern-day OD challenges and what are the opportunities for coaching to contribute to organisational transformation in the future, let us first look at the progress made by OD itself by comparing two sets of findings in relation to the successful organisational changes done with an interval of 15 years. The first set of data is the 8-step process for a successful organisational change proposed by Kotter (1995). The second are the results of the survey by McKinsey (2010) on the commonalities among successfully accomplished transformations. With 15 years separating them, both researches did identify certain common success factors underlying successful organisational transformation. However, there are also clear differences that are arguably reflecting the very increase in the pace of change that happened over the 15 years and the corresponding shift from the need for a sustainable change to a need for a transformation that we discussed earlier.
It was indeed already good eighteen years ago when J.P.Kotter (1995), professor of leadership at Harvard Business School in Boston, shared with the world the finding of his close to 30 years research work summing it up with the shocking resume: 70% of all major change efforts in organizations fail. Based on the major 8 reasons for organisational failures Kotter offered a remedy, his 8-step process for making sure the change will sustain. It’s worth noting that Kotter did emphasise the ever-changing nature of the world and corresponding necessity for the organisations to be able to adapt to changes continuously. However, as the time passed, some of his postulates stopped matching the essentially transformational needs organisations are having today and, as we shall shortly see, require redefinition.
This becomes particularly evident when we compare Kotter’s 8 Steps with the recent results of McKinsey’s survey (2005). Columns 1 and 2 of Table 1 present the highlights of the two researches and allow their comprehensive comparison with the areas of discrepancies being highlighted with red and green colours. The red colour indicates the approaches that might need to be modified or abandoned while the green colour highlights the new approaches that should be added or used instead of the obsolete ones.
Thus, as we can see from the table, the key difference between the two perspectives relates to whether the culture change is to be addressed as early as possible (McKinsey’s view) or as the last step in the change process (Kotter’s Step 8). With the famous ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ declared by Peter Drucker, promoted in 2006 by Mark Fields (Wagas, 2013) and growing in popularity ever since, the approach dominating today clearly prioritises addressing culture related aspects for any strategy implementation and successful organisational change and so puts the ‘out-of-date’ mark on Kotter’s Step 8.
Some other essential differences between the two perspectives could be commonly defined as people issues and reflect development of increasingly people-centered approaches in OD. Thus building pressure to perform and keeping urgency high proposed by Kotter can still serve their purpose for relatively short periods of time needed to implement particular change but continuous fire-fighting mode will certainly produce an increased distress and mass burn-outs when maintained throughout the transformations. What McKinsey offers instead of the continuous pressure is to find the ways to maintain employees’ energy, build engagement and enable everyone’s participation in shaping and driving change initiatives.
Very much in line with the identified necessity to maintain the high energy and motivation is the new requirement to accentuate positive. Although leveraging strength and positive experiences have been used before, e.g. in Appreciative Inquiry approach, the very need for positive experiences appears raising to the next level of importance when it comes to transformations. Finally, building capacity for continuous transformation through development of professional, leadership and organisational capabilities was added by McKinsey as another important enabler for the sustained change mode more and more organisations need today.
Thus, we could see that over the 15 years separating the discussed Kotter’s and McKinsey’s findings some of the factors underlying success of the change lost their priority or even entire applicability while some new have emerged, which certainly had its implications on the development of OD practices and approaches. But what about coaching? To stay ‘central part of a good OD’ it should have been transforming itself too. So, have coaching transformed? How well does it answer the new requirements of the successful organisational transformation? Again, with the reference to the Table 1, there appears to be quite a room for improvement.
Namely, the column 3 of the table presents the predominate coaching practices used to-date to address corresponding OD focus areas and priorities. What can be clearly seen is that despite the huge steps forward made by OD in terms of understanding the new transformational priorities, the application of coaching has stayed pretty much where it was 15 years ago – that is limited to addressing roles and leadership capabilities of executives and, much more rarely, some of the key professionals. While role of the leader stays undoubtedly very important for organisational success, executive and leadership coaching alone do not suffice to address new OD priorities we discussed before. Thus, it appears hardly possible to build and maintain employees’ energy, develop shared values and mutual trust underlying cross-organisational collaboration and boost self-driven professional development without coaching work with employees themselves.
Therefore, in the column 4 of the table I attempted drafting future approach for coaching in organisational context suggesting some new coaching areas and target groups aimed to address the newly defined success factors (with the reference to discussed McKinsey’s findings) and so to further foster successful transformations and sustained organisational change. Proposed approach is meant to be not only holistic, addressing all the identified transformation success factors starting essentially with organisational values and culture and touching on developmental needs of all employees, but also strategic.
Strategic coaching means planning and executing coaching throughout the organisation using diverse set of analytical data reflecting both the changing requirements of the market and the transformational results reached by the organisation. Strategic and holistic coaching ensures that not only the leader and his/her management team but also the majority of the organisation will believe in the set goal, become passionate about the vision and clear and flexible about its implementation and would work enthusiastically and collaboratively on reaching the goal.