Coaching, a powerful tool for tackling organizational change
by Alice Feng
How transformations Fail
Every year, organizations spend millions of dollars on transformation programs, only to accumulate rephrased mission statements and “refreshed” policies and procedures. When the workshops have finished and the trainers have left, the impact on decision-making tends toward zero. In typical transformation initiatives, only 10 percent of what is taught in training is transferred into practice[1]. Even well-intentioned, well-funded transformation efforts will lead to little material change unless reform architects facilitate the final step of transformation: the transfer of new skills, knowledge, and practices from workshops to the workplace. This last step is notoriously elusive. However, organizations can dramatically increase their odds of success by integrating one crucial practice: coaching.
There is an untested assumption that undermines most training and change initiatives. We assume that once a workshop participant can demonstrate their new skills in a simulated learning environment, those skills will automatically transfer into daily work. Unfortunately, the acquisition of skills and knowledge in training does not lead to the transfer of skills into practice[2]. Trainees who participate in these programs frequently fail to sustain their new techniques in the workplace, frustrating efforts for change.
Take, for instance, education reform. Education researchers are painfully familiar with failed reform efforts from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Despite a substantial federal budget, widespread willingness to change, and meticulous research quantifying the impact of new teaching methods, nationwide reforms led to few material changes in teaching. Hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars later, classrooms exhibited the same problems with academic quality and social equality that had first motivated reforms in the first place.
Coaching is the missing puzzle piece
Dissatisfied with these failures, education researchers Beverly Showers and Bruce Joyce sought answers. Thirty-five years later, after dozens of papers, school trials, and tweaks to their implementation strategies, Joyce and Showers isolated the critical component for skills transfer: coaching. According to their research, a best-case scenario without coaching – i.e., training that included theory and discussion, demonstrations, and practice and feedback – led to only a 5 percent adoption rate in the classroom. Coaching improved that rate to 95 percent.
The table below summarises Joyce and Showers’ findings:
Source: Fixen and Blase, Implementation Research, 2005.
These results are not limited to education. Researchers have observed similar effects in every field where working with people is at the core: community health providers, family specialists, clinicians learning motivational interviewing, managers, and finance professionals, among others. Coaching enables change across a broad range of professions because it targets the issue at the heart of change and transformation efforts: the necessarily messy, trial-and-error process of transferring any new practice, method, or set of principles into daily operation.
The reasons that coaching can target these core issues include:
Coaching supports trainees in taking risks necessary for learning. When applying new skills, mistakes are inevitable and can be confronting. For example, a new manager learning agile may need to unlearn methods she once relied on for success – precisely when she feels the project is at risk of failing her standards. Coaching can provide support at critical moments when the new manager feels most vulnerable and are most likely to abandon new strategies.
Coaching takes place in real-time. It deals with specific and contextual issues, facilitating transfer to a world that demands flexibility and adaptation. Without understanding how to “think” in a new model, trainees will likely imitate an ineffective textbook strategy or revert to old practices. Coaching allows trainees to practice “thinking” using a new model to adapt to situations they have not encountered in training.
Coaching helps trainees build the patience they need to help others adjust. For example, a manager shifting to an outcomes-based management style may find his direct reports resisting change by demanding to be assigned specific tasks rather than accepting ownership of a project. Team members need time to adapt to a new environment where their previous strategies for gaining favor no longer work. Coaching provides the space for managers to facilitate behavior change from others.
How is coaching possible at scale?
One-on-one coaching is costly. Sourcing coaches with the right expertise can take time. Reform leaders may only accept the idea of incorporating coaching if they can overcome scale and cost considerations.
Joyce and Showers also faced concerns from schools about the cost of scaling. In response, they replaced external consultants with peer coaches. When they made this change, they found that not only did peer coaches help teachers transfer their new skillsets just as well as external consultants, but the coaching structures also generated school-wide benefits. Teachers had learned how to teach themselves. When faced with further reform initiatives, teachers in Joyce and Showers’ studies reused the same peer structures to teach themselves to change. Peer support has ultimately helped schools learn how to learn.
Peer coaching structures come in many forms, and each organization will require a different setup. As they continued to experiment with peer coaching, Joyce and Showers distilled three practices on which the success of peer coaching depends:
Omit personal feedback evaluating performance. Input of this kind may cause performance anxiety and distract from the learning task. Focus instead on joint planning, goal setting, and problem-solving to apply the new skill; the goal is to experiment to learn how to use a newfound skill with fidelity . Joyce and Showers were surprised to find that coaching was effective without evaluative feedback, contrary to their expectations.
Reverse the role of coach and coachee. The observing peer should think of himself as a coachee, whereas the peer applying her new skills fulfills the coach role. This reinforces a less obvious fact: the observer is learning as much as the person practicing. In addition to seeing what works, the observer learns from his partner’s mistakes by seeing what doesn’t work. Together, they learn by problem-solving what isn’t working. This reversal of roles creates a safe environment for mistakes, which, instead of being the cause for embarrassment, become crucial fodder for learning.
Ensure the engagement of the whole organization. Joyce and Showers found that teachers who were involuntary participants in peer coaching had similar transfer outcomes as teachers who were not coached. Here, it is assumed that before reform efforts are given the green light, those involved have the backing and push from senior leadership to motivate change.
Coaching is a powerful component of any initiative, potentially driving material changes forward where other transformation methods have failed. Peer coaching can help organizations scale, laying the foundations for sustained progress by giving organizations the tools they need to teach themselves. When designing and implementing change initiatives, as in any effort to transfer theory into practice, it’s essential to welcome the messiness that will come. Coaching will increase the odds that reform will bear fruit in that process, even in the trickiest of transformation efforts.
[1] Roger In a white paper in 2002, Robert Rogers of DDI
[2] See Beverly Shower and Bruce, and Implementation research, which arrives at a similar conclusion