Home Page > News and Events > Consulting Firms Encroach On The Coach

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review November 18, 2003.
It features Dr. Carl Rhodes from OVAL Research Centre.

There's a big difference between a management consultant and a business coach, says a new study. Helen Trinca reports.

As the bottom drops out of management consulting, some consultants from the big firms have moved into one-on-one coaching of chief and senior executives, a mark of how rapidly the landscape can change in management.

Not that the consulting firms are bragging about the shift: business coaching suffers from something of a cottage-industry image, peopled by former public servants and teachers who turned to coaching after being made redundant.

That's unfair but one of the big barriers to creating a more sophisticated understanding of coaching is the lack of research and quantification in the industry.

Despite efforts by some coaching organisations, the whole area of training, accreditation and standards is at an early stage although the same could be said of many other sections of the management advice area.

The typical business coach is contracted into an organisation to work with individuals or small groups to diagnose issues and help define goals and strategies. As well as some public confusion about what they actually do, their role has been challenged by psychologists who argue coaches move into the psychologists' territory but lack the training or expertise.

Which is why a new study one of the first in the area from the University of Technology, Sydney, has been welcomed by coaches keen to professionalise their sector and make good the promise of coaching as a key way of effecting organisational change.

The study by Stewart Clegg, Carl Rhodes and Martin Kornberger identified 93 coaching firms in Australia that focus on business coaching, executive coaching or training business coaches. They then used telephone and face-to-face interviews to drill down into how those firms operated.

Their study found a "young and small" industry that faced significant business difficulties because of a lack of an established market.

Some 76 per cent of firms were less than five years old and only 14 per cent were founded more than 10 years ago.

The vast majority had fewer than five employees and half were one-person operations. More than half the firms worked from home offices. Only 12 per cent were exclusively dedicated to business coaching with the others offering various products.

According to Rhodes , the sector needs a defined set of standards and the development of some larger players if it wants to mature and survive. He says coaches have a high degree of awareness of what coaching involves but lack a detailed understanding of the sector as a whole or of their competitors.

Those larger players may well turn out to be the bigger consulting firms, which would be a cruel outcome for coaches.

Many coaches draw a clear line between the two occupations, arguing that coaches are "facilitators" who help clients through a process of finding their own answers, while consultants come into firms with the solutions.

"Consultants advise, coaches facilitate," the report says. "They see this facilitation role as being one of working with clients to help them define and achieve their goals. They do not see themselves as bringing expert knowledge about a particular business."

Or as Kornberger puts it, coaches say "consultants give you a fish, we teach you how to fish".

The problem for coaches is that they spend a lot of time explaining all that to business and an often confused public.

As one participant said: "There is a challenge to get a full, clear understanding of what coaching actually is, compared with consulting. There are a lot of management consultants out there who are adopting the term 'coach' but quite frankly couldn't articulate the distinction between coaching and consulting, therapy management, leadership."

According to the report, business coaching has developed as a response to the shift away from traditions of formal learning outside the workplace to methods that are more informally focused within the workplace and "diffusely embedded in real-time practices."

In the past, coaching was seen as a skill performed by managers or was positioned as executive coaching where an external coach worked directly with senior managers. Now business coaching is not confined to the top end of the firm or focused on managerial skills development but rather tries to improve core business practices and help employees to achieve goals.

"Coaching is designed to be non-directive [with] a focus on skilful questioning in order to help businesses find their own solutions," the report says. "While consulting can quite often be prescriptive, the term coaching is used to focus on processes of empowering, developing, supporting and removing obstacles rather than on telling, judging, controlling and directing action."

The UTS study found that, along with seeing themselves as facilitators and working on process with clients, coaches had a business and personal focus, were interested in the emotional side of business and saw themselves providing customised and flexible approaches rather than standardised and rigid solutions.

The challenge now, according to the UTS team, is for the sector to define standards of service and performance that do not inhibit that flexible and personal approach, develop a more coherent perception of the benefits of coaching, and establish a "robust and durable" coaching business that can take leadership in a growing industry.

The two UTS centres which collaborated on the research - OVAL Research and ICAN Research - are planning to extend the study by analysing the practices of business coaches.

This article is by Helen Trinca and appeared in the Australian Financial Review November 18, 2003.

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