Lucy Kellaway: More harm than good
By Lucy Kellaway
FT.com site; Jul 07, 2002

Imagine that you have your very own executive coach.

If you are an important person, you won't need to imagine too hard, as you will have one already. If you are not an important person, just consider how it would be.

For a start, having a coach will make you seem so much more impressive. You will be able to say: "I'm not going to be able to make it to the 4.30 this afternoon. I've got to see my coach."

You will be visited once a week by someone who in a former life had won a bronze Olympic medal at swimming or who once climbed Mount Everest. He or she will be dynamic, charming, and very, very focused on you.

You can then whinge about how your colleagues don't understand you and brag about your triumphs. You can tell him about an uppity underling you want to kill, and practise a little role playing.

These sessions will be agreeably intense as both of you are 110 per cent dedicated to the same goal - making you ever more successful.

Your coach will be delighted to perform this service as your employer is paying him somewhere between $1,500 and $15,000 a day. The size of these fees is immensely gratifying, not just to the coach but to you - it shows how much your employer values you.

Even from the point of view of the employer, coaching seems like a good deal. The company can congratulate itself that it is investing in its top people and helping them perform at their very best. And the money is peanuts when set against the rest of the executive salary package.

So the arrangement seems win-win-win, for executives, coaches and companies alike. And now that CEOs are in so much trouble, coaching is bound to seem more attractive than ever. It is lonely up there, and it only takes a few top people to bring the company down. Employers may view coaching as an insurance policy. If only Kenneth Lay, Bernie Ebbers et al had had the right coaching, it will be argued, things might have turned out otherwise.

Yet step outside the distorted world of the executive suite and the coaching craze looks rather different. Coaching may be all the rage now but one day companies may start to wonder why they are paying big amounts of money to flatter egos that are big enough as it is. They may wonder about the authority of the coaches themselves and doubt the sales patter and the quick fixes.

There is no evidence that coaching improves performance. The best that can be said for it is that executives like it and, while it may do little good, it is unlikely to do much harm.

That was what I thought until I read the June issue of the Harvard Business Review. This magazine, whose readers are surely all coached to the hilt, has come down vigorously against the craze. In an article by Steven Berglas, it argues that coaching can actually be dangerous. Partly because the coach can get so close to the executive that he starts handing out ill-judged business advice. This sounds pretty alarming. It is bad enough having the company in the hands of a fallible CEO, but to have decisions being made by a former rower is pushing it.

Worse, by relying on trite pop psychology, the coaches can ignore underlying symptoms and end up doing serious psychological harm.

So far, so worrying. However, on closer inspection, it turns out that Mr Berglas is himself a coach who is also a psychologist. He believes in coaching but only when it is done by people like himself.

He gives the example of a workaholic female executive who was given assertiveness training by a coach. During the programme she became thin and unhappy. Enter Mr Berglas, who rapidly diagnosed her real problem as a deep fear of intimacy. She underwent years of therapy and is now happy at work and leading a "more fulfilling personal life".

According to Mr Berglas, no company should put executives through coaching without giving them a thorough psychological test first.

This strikes me as a terrible idea. Surely, if every candidate for coaching were given a psychological exam they would mostly fail with flying colours. I take it as read that CEOs are somewhat unbalanced, have psychological problems or skewed personalities. I have yet to meet one who I would guess had a clean bill of psychological health.

Yet far from needing therapy, the bulk of them should steer clear - for their employers' sake. They have not risen to the top despite their mental problems but because of them. The last thing a company wants to do to a CEO is to make him go into therapy and start questioning why he wants to be in such a competitive, uncivilised, thankless job.

Were I a shareholder I would much rather pay though the nose for an untrained coach to preach harmless quick fixes and maintain the status quo.

Mr Berglas's second suggestion is that companies should hire "independent mental health experts to review coaching outcomes". Mostly there aren't any coaching outcomes. The executives simply want to talk. Which is the saddest and most revealing thing about the process. It shows these senior executives have reached the point where they have no one else - family, friends, colleagues - who is prepared, or who can be trusted, to listen.