July marks the end of the first year of BEE’s Coach Development Program (CDP) with a dozen leaders preparing for certification by the International Coach Federation. Participants say it has been a transformative experience, developing new skills as coaches as well as increasing their personal leadership capability.
Sequestration and budget cuts mandate that agencies find ways to grow their leaders internally and the CDP allows them to do just that. With minimal investment, agencies can develop a cadre of leadership coaches that can eliminate the high cost of external coaches. The efficacy of this approach is borne out by an agency that has asked us to create a customized CDP for them.
Coaches Mwelwa and Johnston
The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology finds that when cost is a major consideration, internal coaching can be an appealing option for executive development.
Studies have found that external executive coaches can cost an organization anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per person, thereby limiting the number of people who can benefit from coaching.
In addition, internal coaches understand the culture and know how to navigate their way through complex organizational systems. Internal coaches are able to provide more real-time feedback and understand the contextual factors affecting the behavior of individuals and teams.
Leaders-as-coaches play an instrumental role in organizational robustness as well as pipeline development. Research shows that engaging in compassionate coaching also helps sustain the leader’s personal effectiveness. Researchers at Case Western have found that coaching by leaders has a psycho-physiological effect that restores the body’s natural healing and shifts one’s mood.
Their findings suggest that leaders who employ coaching as a key part of their leadership role are able to sustain themselves by balancing the efforts of chronic stress with the ameliorative effects of coaching others.
In essence, developing leaders-as-coaches has a direct relationship on leader effectiveness (Boyatzis, Smith and Blaize, Developing Sustainable Leaders through coaching and Compassion, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 5(1), 2006: (8–24).
Read more about the Benefits of Internal Coaching »
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Washington Varsity on the Hudson River, 1914
