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Excellent Executive Coaching: Growing Your Business and Enhancing Your Craft.
EEC 358: Challenging a Perception Opinion that Coaching & Mentoring Investment Cannot Be Measured, with Jeremy Earnshaw
00:29:22
Jeremy has a unique perspective on Coaching & Mentoring, by leveraging over 25 years of global C-Suite Leadership experience with the highest academic Coaching quali fi cations, most notably an MSc Master's Degree in Coaching & Mentoring...
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- [00:05]
A
We all want our coaching and mentoring to be aligned to the individual development of the person being coached and to the organization's objective goals. So let's look at how to implement a system, a process to make the the link between coaching and mentoring and the organizational goals and have metrics. Let's ask the expert. Jeremy Earnshaw. Welcome to the excellent executive coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katrina Birus, and today we have Jeremy Earnshaw. Jeremy, welcome.
- [00:54]
B
Thank you, Katrina. Pleasure to be here. Thanks very much for the invitation.
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A
So you're a coach and a mentor. So please help us define the two so that our listeners are clear on how you define it. Okay, sure.
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B
Let's keep it really straight. I see coaching as a series of discussions, particularly around one area or identification of an issue for change. I see mentoring as more to do with applying experience and advisory skills to the general growth of an individual. And I see that as being the main difference between coaching and mentoring. Katrina.
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A
And you do both?
- [01:38]
B
I do both. I tend to do more mentoring because of my background. My background is 25 years as a CFO, and therefore I'm in a position where I think I've walked in people's shoes and I've been in their boardrooms and I've been in their challenging situations with stakeholders. And therefore, having been there, my job is not to tell people what to do. My job as a coach is to try and help them reach their own conclusion. With mentoring, I'm more inclined to be able to say, for example, I have been in a situation like this. Here are some areas that you may wish to explore in terms of dealing with that situation. In both of them, of course, Katrina, I think it's about helping the individual or the team, or indeed the team of teams reach their own conclusion. Mentoring. A little bit more advice from me.
- [02:36]
A
Great, thanks. That's a good clarification. So what would you say your approach differentiates you from other coaches?
- [02:45]
B
I think what I see is a number of different styles of coaching. And I think it's important also that the client, whether it be an individual, a team, or an organization, chooses the right one. And that might not be me. I think what's really important for people is to choose a coach or a mentor that really fits with them. My strategy is to blend academic excellence with C suite experience. And some coaches, quite frankly, don't have that. And some people may wish to go down, for example, very specific areas, such as life coaching, career coaching. My target audience, as it were, is specifically around aspirational growth in organizations. So where people have identified that they are in a position, but they perhaps are lacking some experience and lacking some skills. And that's where I come in as a coach and a mentor, with my experience blended with academic qualifications as well. Not everybody has that, and it might not be everybody's particular cup of tea, but that's my particular audience. Katrina.
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A
Yes. Okay. So I would like you to explain a little bit your academic approach. What in your approach, where you draw on academia.
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B
I think what I found in particular in coaching and mentoring was that the industry has outpaced the identification of how you evaluate the coaching program. Let me explain that. It's a relatively unregulated industry still, but there's a lot of different kinds of coaches. There's a lot of practitioner and academic work that's been aimed at evaluating, finding out what the return of coaching and mentoring is. My academic approach focused upon that and tried to come up with a framework of evaluation. So that's where I thought there was a gap in the market for looking at the context of the coaching and mentoring, the perspectives of the stakeholders. And if the coaching and mentoring isn't being linked with the strategic objectives of the organization, then you will end up with perhaps a very nice coaching and mentoring program. But at the end of the programme or during the programme, you may find yourself in the position of not really understanding whether it's working or not. So my academic approach is all about scoping that intervention right up front with the various stakeholders and making sure that at every single stage there is a link back to those strategic objectives of the organization and working out what absolute metrics you are going to look for. Some of those will be direct and some of those will be indirect.
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A
Give us an example of how you link it to the strategy and make it very concrete and then make sure that it's aligned to the strategic objective of the company. Give us a specific example, please.
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B
I'll give you six examples where I think coaching and mentoring can be evaluated. On the more direct side, you would look at individual KPI metrics, you would look at organizational metrics, and you would look at customer service metrics. And each, each of those would be more familiar to your listeners. So you would look at the performance of an individual, some tangible metrics, maybe around people and human resources in the organizational sense, and then customer service metrics. We all have to sell something. On the more indirect side.
- [06:39]
A
Okay, before we go on the indirect, you want customer. So how specifically do you get customer returns? You do a survey. Do you go and interview them and also on the organization. What do you say and do when you interview the organization stakeholders?
- [06:58]
B
Yeah, so good question. From a customer service point of view, you would be looking at the metrics such as increase in satisfaction. You would do the regular surveys. You would do this as a control mechanism, prevent and post the coaching initiative. From an organizational sense, you would look at a balanced scorecard of metrics which go way beyond just financial performance. So you would look at the ability of the organization in processes. For example, how easy is it to get things done in an organization? You would look at HR metrics, you would look at retention, you'd look at net promoter scores, you would look at the length of time it takes for you to engage an individual and also how long they on average stay with the organization. We're looking to avoid quiet resignations. And from an individual perspective, you're looking at that blended suite of metrics around perhaps 360 degree feedback. How do other people see you developing as an individual, having been coached and prior to being coached? So you're looking at the metrics that would from a direct point of view, you will be able to judge whether there's improvement in those three particular direct areas.
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A
So those metrics are surveys, interviews, etc. What are they?
- [08:31]
B
Interviews, feedback, 360. Always looking at the perspectives of the stakeholders. And it's a great question to ask the stakeholders in the scoping of the engagement. What do you want to see improve as a result of coaching and mentoring? Is it retention metrics? Is it an improvement in the customer service metrics? And if you don't ask the question up front, you are likely to have a coaching program which is not specific and not going to deliver on the needs of of the stakeholders.
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A
Okay, so that's clear how you link it to organizational metrics and also the customer metrics. What about their improvement in their leadership? How do you evaluate that?
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B
Yeah, I think one of these areas is around how people can demonstrate behaviors and values in an organization as well. And this can be applied to the individual. One of the successes I think of coaching and mentoring is that more and more people are exposed to it and want to participate in it. And that can come from the displays of behaviors and values from the people who have been the subject of coaching and mentoring. So by demonstrating good behaviors, good values, kindness, respect, tolerance, vulnerability, you can gain a waterfall process of coaching and mentoring in an organization being not just for the elite. And this was one of the things that came through my research as well in talking to stakeholders. They wanted coaching and mentoring to be available to everybody in one form or another. How can it touch everybody in the organization either directly or indirectly? And therefore you would create a distributed leadership organization where everybody is adopting the culture and the values and the behaviors of an organization as a result of the coaching and mentoring program.
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A
Okay, now you've got to be very specific. Give us an example of how you evaluate the change in culture from the.
- [10:56]
B
Coaching and mentoring internal surveys every six months, Katrina. And this can be quite expensive to do, but if you drill down with all of your colleagues into the areas of performance and how they see their leaders behaving, you can track that over a period of time. So an initial control survey and in the organization that I've worked with, these can be very detailed but well worth it because on a 6 monthly or a 9 monthly basis, you are constantly analyzing the impact of the intervention that you are paying for as a sponsoring organization. So I think that is one of the most obvious things to be able to do. And it is controlled. If you use the same people to do that, the same organisation, the same techniques, ask the same questions, hopefully you will begin to see very clear improvement from individuals and teams in an organization as a result of the coaching and mentoring program.
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A
You said something important. For the research to be valid, it needs to be the same people, the same technique and the same questions, right?
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B
I think so.
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A
By interviews, you said, is it live interviews, is it questionnaires? How do you evaluate that?
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B
Let me give you an example. And I had this choice to make in my research as well. Do I do it by questionnaire? Do I do it by interviews? I chose to do it by interviews, although clearly you can do it by questionnaires. Interviews will take longer, but you have the opportunity in semi structured interviews to be able to expand upon the original question. And you can use all the techniques that you would know as a coach, Katrina, about listening to understand as opposed to listening to reply. You would use the techniques of silence to understand and drill down into sub question areas. It's then up to a skilled coach or a skilled mentor to collate that information, that qualitative research, to be able to produce something which is tangible, to be able to present back to your stakeholders.
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A
Very good. Because I did a qualitative research for my PhD and I do so too. So I'm very interested of course in your approach because it's somewhat similar. So what the qualitative research. So you ask. I agree with you. Semi structured interviews, you can get to the bottom of it. You can get also not only about the person or the metrics. You can also get ideas that people have. What else?
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B
I think it's important to get a sample, the right sample and what's the right sample and as big as possible to take into account the extremes of the views that you would take. So I think there is. And you would know this, Katrina, having done this, getting your sample correct with respect to age, heritage, gender, your position in an organization, it needs to be a fully representative sample. Otherwise your research is only as good as the sample that you have chosen. And therefore it could be a limiting factor. And as you know, Katrina, in any research, your conclusions are only ever as good as the representations of the sample that you have chosen. And therefore you are constantly in the position of limiting your conclusions with the fact that your sample size is not representative as an example. So as many as possible, to represent.
- [14:51]
A
The fact concretely for our listeners, as many as possible. Give us a range.
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B
I think you'd have to have that range of certainly probably no less than 40 to 50 people across any kind of organization in their various teams. And that's going to take some time, but time well invested.
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A
Yes. Okay, thank you. And you collate the information and you keep it, I imagine, anonymous.
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B
All my research was anonymous, yes.
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A
Okay. So in the process of making it anonymous, sometimes you have to cut a little bit of the corners because the slang you're going to take away, because that's identifying material. When I did that with the un, there's three official languages. You have to structure the sentence so that they can't identify, oh, that's the Spanish speaking, oh, that's Jose. So sometimes the significance of the data could sort of go, so what kind of feedback and how do you give the feedback and to whom do you give the feedback?
- [15:59]
B
I think you raise a great question around the collation of the data. I use the Braun Clark method of data collection in my research, which gives it a structure for identifying common themes. So you were able to generate, again, in my case, I mentioned six clear themes. Within each of those six clear themes, there were probably four to five sub themes. So I use that method as a data collection structure to be able to collate my thoughts. Then when presenting it back, I came up with my recommendations to the organization in question and you report it and give it back as a conclusion to the original stakeholders and the sponsors. The critical thing being, I hope, Katrina, that it has addressed all the way through the original bookend questions of the research. Why are you doing it if it hasn't addressed that? You might well have done some very interesting work which isn't relevant.
- [17:08]
A
Yes. Okay, so how many coach programs or coaching people do you do to get this organizational feedback to be significant? So you do 40. I know 40 to 50 interviews. But do you coach 40 to 50 people? How many?
- [17:27]
B
I think from a coaching perspective, that's up to the sponsoring organization. I think it can be done independently by an external coach to begin with. I think one of the more successful interventions that I've worked with has been where you commence with an independent external coach with a smaller number of people and then set up an internal coaching and mentoring program. One of the measures of success, I think, is the people who have originally been coached and mentored as a coachee and a mentee become the next generation of coaches and mentors internally. And you have that cascading program where everybody wants to be part of it as an organization. I think it's probably beyond most organizations for everybody to receive external independent coaching. Maybe it isn't. But the way to replicate it is to have that internal process developing itself. And that for me also permeates the culture of coaching throughout an organization because there is, I think, still a resistance to coaching and mentoring. There is this perception that everybody's the finished article. I call it the perception of perfection. The reverse of that, if you look at it, is that nobody needs any help through coaching and mentoring. I strongly disagree with that.
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A
Yes. Just to clarify here, you have external coaches and then internal coaches. How many external coaches on average? I know that's difficult question to answer precisely. And then how many internal coaches and how do you train those internal coaches? Of course they've had the experience, but now that doesn't mean that they're coaches really without training.
- [19:27]
B
I think you raise a good point, is that not everybody is a great coach or a mentor. It's very easy to change a LinkedIn banner and become a coach and a mentor. And I particularly didn't want to do that. I think a small number, two to three external coaches working with the same philosophy. I think you can set up the external coaching program, and then I think you want to have between five and 10 internal coaches to cascade that approach throughout an organization. And I think think you can educate and help people to a certain extent by using various techniques in coaching and mentoring. You can introduce people to a set coaching model. Many people have heard of the grow model. I think that's becoming quite outdated now. I think it's quite historic, but it's a very useful starting point. So if we're trying to get Individuals and teams to think about things From a coaching perspective, you could start with the grow model. You could start with the Oscar model. I've created my own models which are around coaching, mentoring, and evaluation. But having that consistency, I think is important. I think you would lose the consistency with more than the numbers of people I've spoken about.
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A
Very interesting. Okay, great. Now, what do you think are the resistance on the individual and the coach organization? So you have and go through this process and then I know these are two questions. What are the sum of the outcomes that they can expect?
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B
I think the resistance stems from the fact that you have to accept that change is needed, and that's not an easy situation for people to put themselves in. By accepting coaching and mentoring, you are equally accepting that you have. On the negative side, let's call it deficiencies. On the positive side, let's call it, you have room to grow. So I think accepting that is not easy for many people. They're in excellent roles in an organization. They're being paid remuneration to do those roles. And then the coaching and the mentoring is suggesting that you could do it better. That's not an easy situation for some people to find themselves in. So the resistance, I think, stems from self awareness, looking at yourself in the mirror and saying, actually, I could do better. There are issues I need support with. There are areas of my work that I could benefit from using a mentor. So that fundamental area of self awareness is absolutely the first step. If you can get over that hurdle, the coaching and mentoring will have so much more value. And I've seen this many times, as I'm sure you will have done as well, if somebody's resistant to change that, coaching and mentoring intervention is highly unlikely to fail despite the best efforts of everybody. In terms of the outcomes, I think from a coaching angle, going back to your very first question, I think you're looking to be able to make your own decisions better on a specific issue or a range of issues. In your role, you're beginning to think more clearly. You're beginning to think better about how to deal with those specific situations. From a mentoring perspective, you're beginning to become wiser, more experienced, recognizing more perspectives, and again make better decisions as an individual. That's probably quite straightforward. You add the context of teams, you're now multiplying those issues several fold. If you then think, in any organization there's a team of teams, you are again expanding the difficulties with which you are trying to develop a solution. But the first step is getting over that resistance to Change. And it involves being vulnerable as well and accepting the fact that you have got some elements of weakness, which is different to being weak.
- [23:54]
A
Yes. No, I'm going to make a comparison, because I'm Swiss and American, between the approach. Now, I'm generalizing, and it's reductive. But if you allow me that the Swiss, you're not really allowed to fail. You know, if you fail professionally and you're bankrupt, it's very hard to start over again. That is less likely in the U.S. you know, failure is learning. So they have a different approach and mentality and they're very much more entrepreneurial in their thinking. I wouldn't say that the Swiss are not entrepreneurial, but failure is perceived differently in Switzerland than I would say in the US So coming to that realization that maybe they can do better is also a cultural issue.
- [24:43]
B
I think it goes back to that phrase I used again, which I only came up with about six to eight weeks ago, actually, Katrina, this perception of perfection. And we do it in two ways. If you're hiring, if you're recruiting, you can sit back, give yourself a round of applause, pat yourself on the back for making a great hire into a leadership position, for example, and then you let people loose in an organization. And we probably both know the statistics that between 50 to 70% of C suite officers going into a new C suite role lose their post within 18 months. And we don't support people to do that because with any person going into that role, they are accepting more responsibility and accountability. Probably. They are probably working with a new team, maybe in a new organization, and maybe in a new sector, then maybe working with external stakeholders, lenders and investors for the first time. And we throw them into this deep end and expect them to. To be perfect, and they're not. So I think that's a really important cultural issue to get over in that we are not perfect and we should accept support in every other sector and industry. People see coaching. We see that all the time in sport, for example, which is a passion of mine as well. How do you get better? Your coach helps you to get better. And the same should apply in organizations. But I think you described it as this fear of failure, perhaps. I think in the UK where I'm based, I think it is still a perception that you have to be perfect. Getting over that is the first step towards making coaching and mentoring work.
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A
Right. Very good. So we're coming to the end of our podcast, unfortunately. Very, very interesting. I'm so glad that you do a lot of research in the organization. So it's man in the organization. Any last comment that you want to make and then I would like to know where people could get a hold of you.
- [26:57]
B
For me, coaching and mentoring is about recognizing the context and the perspective of the intervention. Not all coaching and mentoring engagements will be the same, therefore recognizing the objective of an organization, why a team is potentially being dysfunctional, why an individual could develop more with coaching and mentoring, all of that is context and perspective. And again, what's happened I think in the coaching and mentoring industry is that the industry develops so quickly and taken over from other intervention methods that we've lagged behind in evaluation. So my recommendation to anybody seeking coaching and mentoring or sponsoring the intervention is really spend as much time as possible scoping the engagement and working out upfront why you want to invest in coaching and mentoring and how you are actually going to try and evaluate it.
- [28:04]
A
Thank you very much. And where can people get a hold of you?
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B
People can get hold of me, Katrina, at ClarendonCoaching.com which is my website. I also do my own podcast where I ask leaders to help my audience with techniques and guidance and advice. My podcast is called Clarendon Chronicles, but the easiest way to get to me is via my website, clarendoncoaching.com and I'm very easy to find on LinkedIn. There's not too many people with my name of Jeremy Earnshaw. You'll find me on LinkedIn fairly easily.
- [28:45]
A
Thank you very, very much, Jeremy for this very interesting interview.
- [28:49]
B
Thank you very much, Katrina. Thank you for the invitation. Again, thank you for listening to the.
- [28:54]
A
Excellent Executive Coaching podcast. You can subscribe to all future podcasts at Excellent. Join us each Wednesday to learn more about the latest trends in leadership techniques.
- [29:06]
B
And bring your coaching to the next level. To learn more about Dr. Burris CEO.
- [29:10]
A
Mastermind, use the contact form@Excellent Executive Coaching.com.