COACHING 20 years in the making
Gina Lodge, CEO of the Academy of Executive Coaching, looks at how coaching has changed over the past 20 years and explains why it is so important to help nurture your employees’ potential, create an innovative company culture and, ultimately, grow your business.
A
s we move into an era of business where collaboration outperforms competition as a strategy for success, the use of
coaching has never been more appropriate. Twenty years ago, it was quite different. The coaching concept was in its infancy and there was a real lack of understanding about it, both socially and in business.
At the time, our founder John Leary-Joyce had felt that executive
coaching was a natural fit with his leadership and group/team facilitation work, so had reduced his clinical practice to work as a coach. The Academy of Executive Coaching’s (AoEC) origins come from Leary-Joyce’s vision, as he realised that while foundational courses were available, nothing took coaches into the deeper psychological area while applying it in a business context. The company has grown very much in tandem with the coaching
industry itself. Coaching is now universally accepted as a proven leadership and management development tool, but it is really in the last few years that it is being used across businesses rather than reserved for those in the C-Suite. It is now steadily utilised more as a
core leadership and management skill, as leadership styles shift from the ‘command and control’ model to one of autonomy and inclusion.
GETTING THE BEST FROM YOUR WORKFORCE As we’ve seen over our company’s lifetime, the market is maturing both in the understanding of coaching and the sophistication of the product and the audience. Coaches need to hold professional credentials and that means accredited training and adhering to best-practice standards. Millions have been spent on leadership development and change
programmes, and businesses are now beginning to realise coaching that can bring more effective change. One of the biggest step changes recently has been a rise in the use of team coaching. This is being brought about by organisations moving to a collective leadership framework, the use of remote workers or having teams working in different time zones, as companies look to teamwork to help better create, drive and deliver innovation and value for the customer. Coaching also works well across different cultures and technology has provided the opportunity of a greater reach. The pace of change continues to be an enormous driver in the need for coaching, as organisations increasingly find themselves having
30 | RELOCATE | AUTUMN 2019
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