1.
Insight on Coaching
Coaching Successes in Corporate America: Part 2
Transcript
Prepared for: Prepared by:
IEC: Insight Ubiqus Reporting
Educational
Consulting

2.
Time Speaker Transcript
0:24 Tom Floyd Hello everyone and welcome to Insight on Coaching.
Insight on Coaching explores the many facets, flavors, and sides of the emerging
professional coaching field.
I'm Tom Floyd, the CEO of Insight Educational Consulting, and your host for today’s
show.
Well, today’s show focuses on the successes Fortune 1000 companies are
experiencing implementing Coaching Programs within their organizations.
For those of you who have been with us for a while now, this is a follow up to a show
we did last season, gosh, I think it was in fall, where we had Intel and Unilever on our
show, experiencing some of the successes that they’ve had rolling out of the
coaching program, and this show is a follow-up to that, and the show that we will be
continuing to air each season, kind of as a highlight for folks to check in and see how
a lot of the things that we talk about on our shows, and the themes, and things like
that, that come up, how they're actually being rolled out and addressed in corporate
America.
Today we’ll be talking with professionals who have implemented programs at
organizations including Capital One, Alltel Corporation, and many more.
1:30 Tom Floyd To set the stage I want to share some information that was presented at a session I
went to at the conference board in Chicago a few weeks ago, and it was actually
shared by Dr. Brian Underhill, who is a good friend of mine and has also been on our
show several times as well.
But some of the information that he shared, just to throw some facts and statistics out
there, is he shared some information from the executive development associates
EDA bi-annual survey of trends in executive development, and this was from 2004,
and some of the findings
I thought were pretty interesting in terms of seeing just how much executive coaching
is being used within organizations.
Some of you may have remembered way back when we first kicked off the show a
year ago, we had Strat Sherman on the show and he shared a little bit of his findings
from the Wild West of Executive Coaching, that was published in the Harvard
Business Review.
I guess the question I would kind of throw out there today is, is the West still wild, so
to speak, or has coaching actually increased?
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3.
Time Speaker Transcript
2:37 Tom Floyd Well, from the EDA bi-annual survey, the findings identified executive coaching as
the fifth most prevalent learning method out of 25 possibilities, top five learning
method for the first time since 1984, and that 55 percent of corporations utilize
external executive coaching as learning methodology, which is definitely good news.
It also found that executive coaching is still a relatively new offering with broad
executive level application.
Organizations and coaches alike reported approximately eight years in offering
coaching services.
Organizations in the survey also indicated an average of 52 leaders per year
received coaching, spending an average of approximately $15,000 per leader.
And lastly, 65 percent of organizations reported that coaching represents 1 to 15
percent of their total development approach, and an additional 21 percent of
organizations ranked coaching as representing 16 to 30 percent of their development
efforts, which I thought was fantastic.
3:39 Tom Floyd Well it’s definitely going to be interesting to learn more about how our guests have
successfully introduced coaching programs within their organizations.
And on that note, let me give you a quick overview of each of our guests.
We’re delighted to welcome three coaches on today’s show, Guenet Beshah, Allan
Polak, and Steve Dwyer.
Let’s start out with a quick overview of Guenet Beshah.
Guenet Beshah is currently Vice President of Executive Coaching at Capital One.
After twelve successful years of practicing law, Guenet transitioned to her dream role
as an internal Executive Coach at Capital One in October of 2005.
As an added bonus, Guenet also assumed responsibility for leading and managing
the company’s Executive Coaching Program.
Prior to this role, Guenet was a member of Capital One’s Legal Department’s Senior
Leadership Team.
While in Legal, Guenet had the opportunity to lead the departments largest and most
functionally and geographically dispersed team.
She discovered first hand what it meant to develop leadership agility, manage cross-
functionally, and create a culture of empowerment.
Born in A-ddis A-baba, Ethiopia to an American mother and Ethiopian father,
Guenet’s childhood was filled with travel and cross-cultural experiences.
Guenet obtained her B.A. from Hampton University; her J.D. from Duke University
School of Law, and her Coaching Certificate from Georgetown University.
Welcome to the show Guenet.
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4.
Time Speaker Transcript
4:58 Guenet Beshah Thank you very much.
5:00 Tom Floyd Our next guest is Allan Polak.
Allan Polak has over 25 years management and consulting experience in a variety of
industries. He has held internal consulting and managerial positions in the utility,
financial services, insurance, and managed care industries with The New York Power
Authority, Paine Webber, (ET-NA) Aetna, and The Hartford.
Allan has worked in and managed line and corporate departments in management
training, staffing and selection, strategic human resource and succession planning,
executive and organizational development and HRD strategies/implementation for
large scope mergers and acquisitions.
He has served as a senior internal and external consultant and coach to managers
and executives with their ongoing development, with a special focus on business
planning, communication, team building, and business influence.
He has also served as an external consultant in the design, creation, and delivery of
assessment centers, sales and sales management selection and training, and 360
degree and survey feedback initiatives in large, matrix environments.
His education includes a B.A. from Colgate University, M.A. from New York
University, continuing Ph.D. graduate level education there, and post graduate
completion of Wharton’s Securities Industry Institute and Executive Coaching
program.
Welcome to the show Allan.
6:32 Allan Polak Great to be here, Tom.
Thanks.
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5.
Time Speaker Transcript
6:33 Tom Floyd Great to have you.
And our last guest is Steve Dwyer.
As Senior Vice President of Leadership Development at ALLTEL Corporation, Steve
has responsibility for developing and overseeing ALLTEL’s leadership programs.
Prior to Steve’s employment with ALLTEL in 2005, he was a Colonel in the United
States Army for 30 years.
During his service with the U.S. Army, he served in many leadership roles,
culminating with his assignment as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army Aviation Center, in
Ft. Rucker, Alabama.
Steve received a bachelor’s of science in engineering from the United States Military
Academy at West Point.
He received two master’s degrees, one a master’s of science in administration from
Central Michigan University and the other a master’s of science in strategic studies
from the Air Force War College.
During his service in the military Steve received two Legion of Merit medals, six
Meritorious Service Medals, two Army Commendation Medals, an Army Achievement
Medal, the Master Aviator, Parachutist, and Expert Infantry Badges.
Welcome to the show Steve.
7:34 Steve Dwyer Great to be here, Tom.
Thanks.
7:36 Tom Floyd Now today’s show is going to be a group discussion.
I’m going to pose questions to our guests as a panel to get the group’s thoughts.
So it will really be a good interactive conversation between everyone.
And to kind of start out just with an introductory question or big picture question so
our listeners can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, I’m going to ask
the three of you just to tell us a little bit about you, about your company, or some of
the organizations that you've worked with and your current role within that
organization.
Guenet, let’s start with you.
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6.
Time Speaker Transcript
8:13 Guenet Beshah Sure.
So as you already alluded to, prior to this role I practice law, so I often describe
myself as a recovering lawyer.
Hopefully my legal colleagues will forgive me for that statement.
But it was my dream for years to move into this role.
I have had the benefit of actually experiencing the coaching program from a number
of perspectives, first, as a beneficiary of the program.
So prior to moving into this role, when I was a lawyer for the company actually.
I received an executive coach and became a true believer through that experience.
And once I moved over into this role, I became, as you already stated, a coach and in
charge of the program.
And it has been an absolute amazing experience to be both a facilitator and steward
of this program that Capital One has actually had in place since the late 90’s.
So given that old habits die hard, I did some research as I came into the role, and
discovered that Capital One was an early subscriber, given that coaching actually
didn't sort of come onto the corporate radar screen until the late 90’s.
So we have a very robust program.
It is centralized within human resources, although it is paid for by the business.
We have very strong senior support.
It is used to optimize performance so we use it in three primary ways: to support what
we call leader transitions, so to support leaders who are new to the organization or
who have assumed new roles within the company, to enhance specific competencies
or to enhance specific skills, and to expand leadership abilities.
It is used throughout our organization, so at all executive levels, and throughout all of
our businesses and staff groups.
We use a hybrid matching process, and by that I mean we have a cadre of both
internal and external coaches.
Our external coaches are prescreened by my office, and what we do is we have
eligible executives who will complete what we call an executive information form,
which lets me know what they'd like to focus on, and it gives me some insight into
their preferences in terms of coach background and experience level.
We take that information and we provide them with a list of recommended coaches.
They have the option to interview one or all.
Chemistry is such a huge component of that relationship so we want to make sure
that we afford them that opportunity.
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7.
Time Speaker Transcript
11:12 Tom Floyd Well it’s really nice that they have that ability as well.
I know that for myself, I, like you as well, believe in coaching so much that I also have
my own coaches as well, and it really helped me, and certainly an advantage to
doing this show as well so that I’ve gotten exposed to so many different folks that are
out there. And you're right, just that click from a personality perspective.
To really be able to open up and share new challenges that you might be having, or
goals, and things like that.
It’s really important.
11:44 Guenet Beshah Yeah, there are two schools of thought out there, and I think it very much depends on
how you're going to use coaching in your organization.
So I actually attended a conference where there was actually very robust debate
around whether the organization ought to select the coach for the individual or
whether the individual ought to play a role in that.
12:07 Tom Floyd Interesting.
12:08 Guenet Beshah The thinking was that if the executive is someone who doesn't sort of have great self-
awareness to begin with, do you want to trust them to make the decision around
which their coach ought to be.
But the way we use coaching in our organization is that coaching—one of the
reasons I love coaching is that it presumes competence. We’re not trying to fix
broken people.
So operating from that space, we trust our executives to know the person that they're
going to work best with.
12:46 Tom Floyd Got it, and definitely the piece too around some folks view it as a fix-it solution versus
as more of a tool for self-realization.
It’s going to be interesting that more as well.
Well I’m hearing the music for our first commercial break so I’ll go ahead and go on
pause.
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8.
Time Speaker Transcript
15:41 Tom Floyd For those of you just joining us today, on today’s show we’re speaking with several
executives who have successfully introduced coaching programs within their
organizations.
Where we left off, we were speaking with Guenet Beshah, who was talking about
how coaching was introduced at Capital One and some of her experience there.
Going to go ahead and move on to our other two guests to give us a high level
overview about their role, their company, or the organizations that they’ve worked
with before, and how coaching has been introduced from their perspectives.
So Allan, let’s go ahead and move on to you.
16:22 Allan Polak Sure.
This is Allan Polak, and I’m the principal of ALP Consulting, based in Connecticut.
We've been doing this work for about 20 years at this point.
It’s gone through a number of iterations.
But my own background includes having worked internally for about 20-plus years
within organizations and the last number of years externally with ALP Consulting.
And I would reiterate a number of the points that Guenet mentioned—that in the
companies that we work with, which include companies like Pfizer, United
Technologies, Hartford Financial Services, our work includes both providing
executive coaching as well as being a consulting resource to companies and how
they set up their program so that it drives success within their companies.
And we have found that the models that seem to work best are geared towards
providing the services for leaders at certain levels and above who are in a major
transition, such as from functional leadership to strategic leadership, for succession
preparation, for people who are new to the organization at those executive levels,
and again, as Guenet said, new to the company or new to their role, and we refer to
that as on boarding.
We also see companies using this during major M&A activities or during major
change to help their leaders lead the business in the best way during those times.
And as an investment in key talents or high potential talent to help those people
prepare for future leadership roles.
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9.
Time Speaker Transcript
17:55 Allan Polak Our approaches highlight, that you want to invest in your best and not engage in this
work as rescue or fix it endeavors.
Our experience has been, and the companies we work with has been, is that when
you set up programs for remediation, or rescue, or fix it, it doesn't work more often
than it does, which is not to say you cannot invest in a really talented person who
may have a bit of a flat side but we have found that when it’s a rescue, or a fix it, or
the company is saying gee, we’ve tried everything else, let’s set this person up with
an executive coach.
More often than not it doesn't succeed.
18:35 Tom Floyd And what are some of the reasons for that, based on what you’ve seen in the past?
18:39 Allan Polak What we've seen is that the reasons it doesn't succeed very often at all is—the
phrase we use is that reputation has a long tail, and that once a leader has a
reputation in a company, it’s very hard for that reputation to really turn itself around
180 degrees.
And what we’ve seen is, on a couple of occasions where an executive will receive
some coaching in kind of a fix it mode, they can work, 19 times out of 20, where
they're doing a behavior or a business effort better, and the company often doesn't
see it.
What the company sees is that one time out of 20, when they're under stress or
having a bad day, where they’ll fall back on a problematic behavior or style.
That's what the company picks up and notices.
Because we have found, and there's research behind it, people will see what they
expect to see. And so part of the coaching work that we engage in is helping our
players leverage their strong suits, go with their strong suits, and also have a set of
strategies in place that actually helps key decision makers and leaders see their
growth.
Because if you don’t help the organization sees the growth, they typically don’t see it.
Because people are so busy in their day to day that you have to say, have you
noticed how so and so has done X a bit better or differently?
20:08 Tom Floyd So it’s almost like with what you were saying before with the reputation piece, just to
come back to that point. It’s almost been, from your experience, that let’s say that
somebody has a perception as a leader that they're a micromanager or something
like that.
That even if they receive coaching around that, the perception is still going to exist,
that they're a micromanager within the organization and people aren’t generally aren’t
going to be able to see past that.
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Time Speaker Transcript
20:31 Allan Polak If they have a reputation as a micromanager, but they also have a reputation that
they're really good at eight or nine other things, that can be addressed because
micromanagement is a very behavioral issue that you can get executive coaching
with.
But if their reputation is of a larger nature. Gee, so and so is just a brutal person to
work for, a more global reputation, that's really hard to turn around.
20:53 Tom Floyd So, we've had Eddie Erlinson on the show, for example, which, he and his wife Kate
have been doing the research around the alpha male, and alpha female, for example.
So if you have some of those very dominant personalities that can almost become
abusive when gone awry, so to speak, in organizations, you're saying some of those,
that's kind of harder to get past that.
21:14 Allan Polak Well what you're speaking to, Tom, is that it’s much easier to help somebody make
shifts or changes in their behaviors, but if you're talking about expecting a major shift
in somebody’s major personality or traits, that's a whole other game.
21:27 Tom Floyd Yup, definitely.
21:28 Allan Polak We had one client who actually approached us about working with a fairly senior
person who they said, oh, they're not quite on the up and up.
You know, they have some integrity issues. And we said well, we’re talking about a
selection issue, you know. You can help somebody with their integrity, that's not a
development issue. You're really going to change somebody’s core integrity.
21:47 Tom Floyd Got it.
Steve?
Anything that you would add?
21:51 Steve Dwyer Well, I’m smiling here listening to Allan because I heard him talk at the conference,
and the reputation has a long tail.
I've actually used that quote a couple of times since then, and I couldn't agree with
you more.
We just took a different approach, if you want me to get into my approach now, Tom,
I can.
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Time Speaker Transcript
22:10 Tom Floyd Yeah, sure, definitely.
22:12 Steve Dwyer We had not had any leadership development program at all until August of 2005, and
I had met the CEO while I was still in the Army, and he asked me to bring the Army’s
leadership approach to Alltel.
And in a way I did and in a way I didn't.
I kind of took some of the good stuff and some of the good stuff that I've learned
since I've been out of the Army.
But our approach was to take a 360, an evaluation from peers, subordinates, and the
boss, and couple that with coaching.
And then dovetail some training in to kind of tie it all together.
So that's been our approach.
And as far as the coaching goes, we looked at our leaders kind of like rental cars,
and I mentioned that at the conference, that [crosstalk] you don’t really do anything to
a rental car except put gas in it, and that's how we were treating our leaders.
We gave them no development, we gave them—and if they didn't work, we just got
another rental car.
And that works during our very big growth period when our growth hid all of our sins,
but as we got to the point where the mergers and acquisitions started to dwindle
down and we realized for a lot of reasons that we had to work with what we had, we
started looking at developing the leaders.
That’s when we started going into the coaching piece, and our first approach was to
say let’s give everybody above a certain level a coach.
23:46 Steve Dwyer Now, Allan, in there are some people who need remediation, and frankly, it did not
take with everybody, and I could not agree with you more that some people with
those personality defects, I call them, that are not going to change—and you know
the bullies that are out there, the people that just take advantage of the position
they're in, those people aren’t going to change.
But we also had to have a way to find out who they were because if you produced
results you got promoted at Alltel.
Since we’ve instituted the value system—we have a set of eight core values, we’ve
now changed the way we hold people accountable to those values.
One of those values is results but there are seven other ones and there are things
like respect, integrity, knowledge, teaching people.
So it’s not just getting results, it’s more of the how you got results.
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Time Speaker Transcript
24:39 Allan Polak Yeah, it’s the what and the how.
24:41 Steve Dwyer Yeah, so now we have the coach, who is supposed to kind of coach them to the
other set.
They wouldn't even be there if they didn't get results. And then what the coach found
is most of the people got it.
Most of the people thought this was the greatest thing in the world.
And there were a few people that bristled and frankly, some of those people have
since been let go, and some very senior folks, and it’s not because of the leadership
development program, it’s because the business imperative of taking care of people
so that we could get better results started to come through.
It’s not all this touchy feely stuff, it’s hey we have a 50 percent turnover rate.
We've got to do something about it. Well let’s figure out— Oh!, it’s the boss.
Surprise.
Why don’t we get rid of the boss and see if this turnover rate goes down.
So we've been starting to use those values as a way to determine who gets to stay
and who has to go.
And all of this—
25:40 Tom Floyd Is it almost like—I was going to ask this question of everyone as well.
In terms of coaching around the values in this case, at Alltel, or if it was
competencies, or something like that, is it a process of the coach working with the
coachee to establish goals, that they be smart goals, or something like that, tied to
those values so that they kind of have a centralized conversation each time that
they're talking about it? So if the value is respect, for example, that they're putting
goals or measure in place to really help work towards that particular value?
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Time Speaker Transcript
26:12 Steve Dwyer That's exactly right.
In our case, and I’ll let the other guys talk, we have what's called the developmental
plan, and the coach coaches to that developmental plan. And in the plan are eight
categories, and in one category, integrity, it’s sort of the price to play, the price to get
into the game.
You have to have integrity.
If you don’t have that, you're probably not going to get much farther.
But say for example, respect, which also includes collaboration with other silos, if you
don’t have that, let’s coach to that. And so we have this plan that the coach uses as
a tool.
That's how we do it.
26:45 Tom Floyd Got it.
Actually, I have a big smile on my face.
And hearing that, that's one of the things that our company does as well, and I
actually have two coaches, and we coach around our competencies.
Our company has 15 competencies.
And a personal thing about me, one of mine is accountability.
And it was interesting to come out in my coaching sessions and to have goals around
the accountability, it wasn't that, and I never would have been able to articulate this
before in terms of how my interactions could relate around, you know, our company’s
core competencies like that.
But for me, with accountability, it’s not that I’m not accountable, but that’s a ticker for
me when other people aren’t.
I had to learn internally within our company, interesting when I don’t see that value or
competency coming through in someone else that sparks something in me that was
really insightful for me to kind of have a reflective session around that.
What are some of your thoughts?
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Time Speaker Transcript
27:42 Guenet Beshah The other thing that I would add to that is that—so we do two things.
We have a coaching action plan, which does cross-reference to our competencies,
but as a result of a survey that we did with our coachees, we made a special effort
around drawing a stronger connection between the development goals and our
business goals.
So we made a push this year to ask our executives to work back from their business
goals.
So what particular leadership goals, development goals, do you need to focus on as
a result of specific business goals.
So let’s make that link even more specific.
A point that I made at the Chicago conference is that I think we sometimes forget, for
the sake of what does a business provide coaching?
And the purpose is to drive better business results.
I think we ought to have this conversation around self-actualization.
To what end? And the reality is to drive greater business results and to deliver
business performance.
29:00 Tom Floyd And so if it really is improving the bottom line.
29:04 Guenet Beshah Absolutely.
29:05 Tom Floyd Got it.
Well let me go ahead and go on pause for a second.
I'm hearing the music for our next break.
Stay tuned everyone, we’ll be right back.
31:31 Tom Floyd Where we left off, Guenet, you were making a really good point, I thought, around the
importance of making sure that coaching is 50/50, so to speak, 50 percent and that
it’s really focused on improving the bottom line or focused on business results.
And the other side of that, really making sure that it’s actually helping someone grow,
especially in terms of leadership and things like that as well.
Anything else that you would add along those lines?
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Time Speaker Transcript
32:08 Guenet Beshah No.
I just want to emphasize the fact that getting great business results and helping the
executive grow, that those two things can mutually coexist.
I think that there is sometimes a sense that they are mutually exclusive and that there
is some fear that the two can't co-exist, and I think that that's absolutely not the case,
and I think the fact that coaching continues to be an intervention that organizations
are using year after year proves the power that coaching actually has.
I think it’s something that is extremely responsive.
It is something that is extremely results oriented, and we can't forget that at the end
of the day, it is designed to deliver business results, and as long as we keep our eyes
on the prize I think coaching will continue to be a powerful intervention.
33:03 Tom Floyd Got it.
33:04 Steve Dwyer You know, Guenet, I’d like to add one thing to that.
The holy grail in all of this is trying to figure out how to measure all that.
Because when you say it adds to the business results, there's going to be somebody
in the business that, at least in my world, says it had nothing to do with coaching.
That's because we changed the comp plan or whatever.
So the real difficulty, I think, is trying to find out how you can tie this is in—tie success
of business into part of the coaching, as a result of some of the coaching.
And we've tried to do that and I’m always interested in how people have done that,
but we've just done some surveys that show that the people that were getting the
coaching had increased their productivity as seen by them.
The next thing we’re going to do is ask the stakeholders, have you seen the same
increase in productivity, and add addition to the bottom line as they have, and kind of
tie those things together.
But it’s always anecdotal, it’s always opinions, and I'm wondering if there's anybody
that's figured out how to tie it directly to the bottom line.
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Time Speaker Transcript
34:05 Guenet Beshah Well I can tell you what we've done.
So we have done, similar to you, we've taken a qualitative approach by surveying the
executives that have participated in the program, and consistently we get very
positive feedback from them that, one, they value the program, they think it’s a
standout opportunity provided by the company, and that they think that they are
getting progress with respect to their own results, and that they're very satisfied with
their coaches.
But this year, we also did a quantitative statistical analysis, using our performance
management feedback, and I'm happy to report that we discovered very statistically
significant evidence that coaching was actually having a very positive impact on both
performance and attrition for us.
It was over a two year period, so while we haven't yet made the correlation to actual
business performance, we have shown a correlation to actual performance.
35:10 Allan Polak And that is—this is Allan speaking—that's a way that we've suggested to our clients
as well, to at least look at the correlation between your performance management
system and your coaching interventions.
Causality is going to be really tough because your business results are a product of
multivariate stuff, but you can look at some correlations between your performance
management measures and your coaching events.
35:35 Allan Polak Along the lines of putting it into the business model, we have found that our
recommendations that, when you're putting a coaching program into place, in an
organization, that you think about how can I make it as similar as possible to how I go
about doing a business plan?
So in that sense there are clear time frames, there are clear expectations up front,
there are clear monitoring and tracking mechanisms during the course of the event,
and then clarity about evaluation at the outcome, both by the coach, the person’s
boss, the executive being coached, etc.
And we have found that when you structure it as if it’s a business plan, there's
credibility in the organization, and quite frankly, the coaches value that themselves
because good executive coaches want to provide services to the individual but they
also want to partner with the organization.
And there's nothing worse for an executive coach to be hired by an organization to
work with an individual, and given no context about the company or the environment
that he or she is being asked to help with and bring value to. So it’s the service of
the business results and that's the ultimate goal.
You have to know the culture and the context within which you're working.
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36:53 Tom Floyd So what you're saying is that you really need to make sure that the coach
understands the business, the culture, the norms, what's okay, what's not okay.
37:02 Allan Polak We know of a couple of companies who had the roles and the rules quite clear at the
beginning of the coaching engagement, that confidentiality would be respected with
the client or the coachee, but as a key player in the organization there is also the
person’s boss that the coach is expected to engage with.
And I know of two instances where that didn't happen and the company really had to
say look, you have to realize that you have multiple clients here. It’s not just that one
individual because the goal is the business results, not just helping that person gain
greater self-realization.
37:40 Tom Floyd In terms of going down the path further of how a company could link it to business
results, so if we’re looking at a metric, quality for example, or customer satisfaction,
or something like that, how would you recommend or how have you come up with
how much coaching could actually impact that?
Off the top of my head, one thing that I've seen and that we've done for some clients
from a training perspective is getting executives in a room or even if it’s surveying
them and saying okay if these are the ten factors that impact quality and training is
one of them, coming up with some type of average or percentage for all of them.
So if you said training contributed to a five percent increase or decrease in quality,
and marketing was 20 percent, and—I'm making this up, the numbers—but other
things like that, that that's how we were able to help a few organizations kind of guide
that or come up with a rough estimate based on that.
Is it through exercises like that, that you're finding you're able to come up with just
how much it impacts key metrics that are out there or what's that process look like?
39:02 Steve Dwyer Is that for Allan?
39:03 Tom Floyd For anybody.
39:04 Allan Polak Anybody.
39:05 Steve Dwyer Well just for me, we've tried all that stuff, but when you run up against a black and
white kind of guy like a CFO person, all that stuff is really hard to sell.
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39:18 Guenet Beshah Because it’s so viewed as subjective.
39:20 Steve Dwyer Yeah, so all that stuff—I mean, Allan, you were ticking off the things that we’re trying
to do. There may be one thing we missed in there, but most of the stuff you were
saying, we are trying to do all that.
But then it comes budget time and budget time happens for us about four times a
year, each time we go through the quarter, and they always say now what are you
doing again, Dwyer?
And then I lay it all out, and I show them all these things, and they say well where's
this all—there's got to be a way to show us.
So what they’ve come up with is attrition, or turnover, and by reducing turnover you
can show.
For us it’s $39,000 to train a sales rep.
So the person in the store costs $39,000 to put him on the floor.
So if you can keep him around for another six months, you can do the math.
So if you can reduce turnover you can show a direct correspondence to the bottom
line.
That's the operational cost, and then you can also show that through customer
advocacy scores, what a customer that's an advocate will do for your business.
We can measure that, and the same for employee advocacy, but we’re still in our
embryonic stages right now because we haven't really brought that out.
But by turning someone from just a customer to someone who will sell you to other
people, you can show that that has some sort of effect on the bottom line.
So that's kind of what we’re doing.
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40:46 Guenet Beshah Hey guys, so let me just say, I’m fortunate because I don’t have to continue to make
the case for coaching in our organization.
The thing is, is that we've been an organization, we became public in 1995, and I
think we have plenty of evidence that coaching has, again, been an extremely
powerful competitive tool for us over the years.
It’s been a constant, through a lot of exponential change for us as an organization,
it’s expanded. When we needed to expand, it’s provided a level of customization that
I don’t think a lot of other tools afford us.
It’s provided sort of that built-in diversity for the different learning styles of our
executives. It’s presumed the competence of our executives and it’s been
responsive to our needs, again, depending upon where we were in our organization’s
life cycle, and I think it has met the business environment and the leadership
demands that all of us face as organizations.
No one can doubt the business complexity that we have to deal with right now—the
fact that information is so fluid and our leaders are having to make judgment calls
based on imperfect information, the fact that the rate of change is absolutely
challenging human ability to adapt.
And what coaching affords is an opportunity for people to pause, to reflect, to make
informed choices to align accordingly, and to drive good, sound, business judgments,
and that's your ROI.
42:38 Steve Dwyer No argument there.
You're way down the road from where we are, Guenet.
We’re still—I'm still fighting the Revolutionary War.
You're well into the industrialization era.
I’m still trying to convince about six or seven people that help run our company.
My one advantage is the CEO is 100 percent on my side.
But my job is to be more collateral. I can't just go in and say hey do it because the
CEO said.
So I'm trying to convince these people one at a time exactly what you were saying.
43:12 Guenet Beshah No, I’m not suggesting that you don’t have your ammunition.
That's why you go ahead and you run your analysis, and you shore up your program,
and you make sure that you are responsive to your stakeholders.
But you also make sure that you can tell the story, and there is absolutely a very
powerful story here.
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43:34 Allan Polak There’s the stories, and Steve, I’m thinking out loud that there's always a desire to
find the common three or four metrics that will help you measure the impact of
executive coaching, and we’ve worked with a couple of clients to remind them.
There are often kind of individual metrics in given situations that can show you the
impact, and I’m thinking of one client from a couple of months ago, where there was
a very senior person, where there was energy in the company because they believed
in 360 feedback a lot in this company, they were all set to go down the road, let’s do
a really robust 360 interview-based data gathering of 10, or 12, or 15 people, and this
person will see the important information.
And the intervention was made, look, before you go down this road, invest in two
meetings with a coach to see whether that person is motivated to use that feedback.
It turned out the person really wasn't motivated to use that feedback, and they saved
about $20,000 in fees.
44:38 Tom Floyd That’s fantastic.
44:39 Guenet Beshah Yeah.
44:39 Tom Floyd Well I’m hearing the music for our last break. Let’s go ahead and go on pause. Stay
tuned everyone.
47:01 Tom Floyd Just to kind of recap, we covered a lot of things in the last part of the show here, but
to summarize, we talked about some key metrics and ways to tie coaching back to
the impact on the bottom line.
Some things that came up in the conversation were the importance of executive
sponsorship, the importance of having common metrics and a measurement system,
and also the importance of continuing to evangelize the program, once you have it up
and running.
I want to kind of switch gears a little bit.
I want to talk about resistance and how each of you positioned or introduced
coaching within your organizations to minimize resistance.
Something that I heard come up at the conference when we were all there a few
weeks ago, and I wanted to kind of explore that further.
So what my question here is, is how did you position or message coaching when it
was introduced? In other words, what did you use to help people understand what's
in it for them to receive coaching?
Allan, let’s start with you.
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48:24 Allan Polak I'm thinking of one company we work with where there was a history of executive
coaching but in a very kind of fly by night manner.
So our recommendation was to position to the company, look, you have no idea of
what you're spending on this endeavor or the impact it’s having if you permit it to
continue in the way you're doing.
We actually heard a story where a certain executive coach in this company literally
wandered the executive hallway, stopping in executives’ offices, mentioning gee I’m
doing some work with Bob down the hall, would you like some assistance yourself?
And when we heard the company describe that, we said, and how long did you
permit that to go on?
49:06 Tom Floyd That was going to be my next question, actually.
49:09 Allan Polak Well, the company was naïve.
They said well, isn't that how the work is done?
And we said no, we don’t think so.
So it was pointing out the cost of doing that in such a sloppy way and also pointing
out the impact on the business that well positioned executive coaching can have on
retention, as Steve says, on the impact on your high potential players, right?
Your strongest talents do not want to work for weak bosses.
49:41 Steve Dwyer Absolutely.
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49:42 Allan Polak They will leave.
And the demographic reality of today’s workforce is people will put up with that less,
and less, and less.
So it was about the power of retaining your strongest talent, building your leadership
pipeline.
Companies know that unless they're thinking about how do I build my leadership
pipeline so that my company’s going to thrive in the next three, five, to eight years,
they know in their bones and in their numbers that their company will suffer.
So we find that a powerful positioning is to say how are you fixed for your leadership
pipeline over the next three, to five, to eight years?
What do you feel most confident about, what are you worried about?
And that's a good stepping off point to help them think through about, so therefore,
what we want from a coaching program.
50:26 Tom Floyd So that's kind of the way it was pitched then to the stakeholders?
50:29 Allan Polak That's right.
50:31 Tom Floyd In terms of going after the individuals, let’s say that first group, if it’s the initial group
of executives, or if you're starting at the top, working down from there.
How did you position the what’s in it for me, for them, so that people weren’t charging
in and saying hey I think you need a coach now.
How did you message it in terms of this is why we think it will be beneficial for you
and your career development?
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50:58 Allan Polak We and I’m thinking of the same company—there are two major populations you
want to speak to.
Those people who would be nervous about engaging in this endeavor—gee, what's
that about?
Does it mean I’m broken?
And those leaders who would say, oh yeah, sign me up, sign me up, I want to do that
stuff. And so you have two different messages, and the messages would come from
the senior leaders and the senior HR leaders, in a fairly small communication, saying,
we have this resource that is available to our strongest players.
And that, in the beginning, is saying listen; we wouldn't be offering this to you unless
we wanted you to grow your career here.
So we have this resource available to our strongest players where we work with
external experts who have a deep experience in what enables leaders to succeed in
large organizations.
And we position it as a partnership, and we recommend to companies that they use
the metaphor that works for their industry.
So for example, in a high technology company, UTC for example, we like to position
this as the client or coachee is the pilot, and the coach is the copilot, because that's
about ownership.
In the financial services industry we’ll talk about executive coaching as inviting a
leader to take stock of their portfolio.
What's in their portfolio that serves them very well in the current and in the future
role, and what shifts might they want to make in their portfolio so that it brings a
maximum return for the business and their leadership.
And we find that when you use a metaphor that speaks to that industry, lights go on
in people's heads about oh, so that's what it’s about.
52:35 Tom Floyd Got it.
Guenet, anything that you would add?
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Time Speaker Transcript
52:38 Guenet Beshah No.
I agree very much with many of the points that Allan already made. What we did at
Capital One is that we rolled coaching out in connection with the rollout of our new
competency model.
So it was rolled out in a much targeted fashion with senior executives in the
company, and they realized the value of coaching, and became fans and users of the
program, and became disciples of the program, if you will.
And that built momentum for the rest of the organization.
Then we began to use coaching more broadly in the organization.
So to Allan’s point, we utilized coaching for our stronger performers and that set the
stage in our organization to view coaching in a very positive light, so it was not
something that people viewed in a pejorative fashion.
They wanted it.
I did not have to deal with any type of resistance in the organization.
It was not something that I had to push onto people.
53:46 Tom Floyd Okay.
53:48 Allan Polak A good phrase that we've used for organizations in terms of developing their people
is you want to engage everybody but you want to invest in your best.
53:56 Tom Floyd Got it.
Well we have got one minute left and just to recap, I want to ask in closing if you
were to offer advice, suggestions, or tips, to companies out there, who are
considering implementing a coaching program, what would that be in kind of a 30
second or less spiel?
Steve?
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Time Speaker Transcript
54:15 Steve Dwyer I would do what Allan was discussing because when we first started out coaching it
was like throwing water on a dry sponge.
Everybody got it, everybody soaked it up.
The next time we do it, and we’re going to have a holistic approach, it’s going to be
for our very best or people that are transitioning from say, the operational leadership
level to the strategic leadership level, so by definition, they’ll be their very best.
It’s investing in high-po’s or people that are going to be high-po’s.
54:42 Tom Floyd Got it.
Guenet, anything that you would add?
54:45 Guenet Beshah Agreed.
Just be thoughtful and be clear about what success looks like.
54:49 Tom Floyd Okay.
Allan?
54:51 Allan Polak I’d repeat those things and say put a specific time-limited plan to it so that your
message is look, we’re treating this as any other business endeavor.
This isn't just about meeting with somebody and feeling better.
55:04 Tom Floyd Got it.
Well, a huge thank you to the three of you for joining us today, and as always, huge
thank you for our listeners as well.
For more information about our show you can look us up on the Voice America
Business Channel.
You can visit our web site at www.ieconsulting.biz and always feel free to email me
at tfloyd@ieconsulting.biz with any questions as well.
And also for you Apple iTunes and iPod fans, don’t forget you can also get access to
our show through the music store.
Open up iTunes, go to the music store, click podcasts, and enter Insight on Coaching
in the search field.
Thanks again everyone, we’ll see you next week.
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