Robert Hargrove

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. - Che Guevara

When I wrote my book Masterful Coaching in 1995, I had spent years criss-crossing the globe on business trips. I often sat next to executives on flights who would voice their disappointment with both leadership training and management consulting. The typical comment was: “We spent over a million on a McKinsey study last year and not a single recommendation was ever implemented.”

I heard similar complaints about leadership training: “Every year we march thousands off to abstract leadership training programs, but what’s the impact on bottom-line results?” I had my own well-established leadership training and consulting business, but I couldn’t keep from asking myself: What’s missing from this picture?

I got interested in “coaching” because it was distinct domain with a long tradition in sports and the performing arts, and to some extent business. It seemed that coaches in these fields were expected to expand people’s capacity to realize an Impossible Future for themselves and their organization, something that could only happen if the people involved grew by leaps and bounds in the process.

By contrast, consultants are only expected to deliver reports and recommendations, and leadership trainers expected to deliver the course material and receive happy sheets with high marks by participants at the end of a typical three-day training program.

I wrote about all this in Masterful Coaching. My basic paradigm of coaching was that extraordinary leaders develop in the process of producing extraordinary results. Though this sounded good on paper, it wasn’t until I actually started practicing executive coaching with a handful of clients that I discovered that I had stumbled onto to something with revolutionary game-changing potential.

My first clients not only declared an Impossible Future, but also made giant strides in realizing it by delivering on extraordinary and tangible bottom-line results. At the same time, they were calling this work “the ultimate self-development and growth experience.”

I began to have dreams at night of starting a coaching revolution that would ultimately overthrow the tyranny of management training and consulting, and replace that with Masterful Coaching. This was over a decade ago and at first glance, it seems that great progress has been made in that revolution. Many Global 1000 firms hire executive coaches on a regular basis. The ICF claims to have almost 20,000 members and the Wall Street Journal has reported that coaching is a billion dollar industry.

Yet for all this noteworthy progress, I believe that the real revolution in coaching has yet to get underway. Consultants still do what they have always done – reports and recommendations. Trainers still do what they have always done – teaching homogenized corporate leadership competencies. At the same time, I have run across many HR managers, ICF Chapter leaders and other members of accrediting organizations who have yet to recognize that coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment, not therapy.

It is time now to jump start a coaching revolution which seeks to overthrow individuals or certifying bodies who are fostering a coaching mindset and practices that are bound to misfire when coaching executives on the front lines of business, government, or other fields.

It is time to start a coaching revolution by first establishing a vision of coaching that is all about helping people realize an Impossible Future and accomplishing what they really need to accomplish, not just about personal growth and development in isolation.

The coaching revolution must occur in four key areas of professional practice and I will be writing blogs on each in the coming weeks. Taken as a whole, these blogs will represent the Masterful Coaching Manifesto:

Start a coaching revolution in management! Stop focusing on the leader as a steward of the past polishing up grandma’s china; start focusing on the leader as coach whose job is to realize an Impossible Future.

Start a coaching revolution in training! Stop thinking that extraordinary leaders develop by studying homogenized corporate leadership competencies; start thinking that extraordinary leaders develop while producing extraordinary results.

Start a revolution in consulting! Stop flying in at 50,000 feet with a nifty report or recommendation and then fly out in a cloud of dust; start sticking around to coach people on the vagaries of implementation.

Start a coaching revolution in HR, your Corp University, or Coach U! Focus 80% of your budget on classroom training for the many; focus no less than 20% of your budget to coaching the pivotal few on real goals and real problems in real time.