Interview: Can coaching make IT chiefs into business leaders?

Caplin: Footballers don't win without coaching

IT Week: So what is an Executive Coach? Is it like business training?

James Caplin: Coaching is absolutely not a euphemism for training. Training tends to be a defined period of time when you go and you learn something… There is a continuum where at one end there is training and at the other end there is psychiatry. … and sitting in the middle is coaching. It is about entering the way the person views the world and helping them identify options that will help them work more effectively.

Why do you think people should consider coaching?

Firms understand you have to get staff trained up in new systems and technical qualifications. But the one thing that a lot of people don’t think will be so useful, are people skills. The skills that are laughingly referred to as the soft skills - and I'm not really sure why, because they are often the hardest skills to acquire. You can’t acquire those skills, I think, with a sheep dip [training approach]. For obvious reasons, one day on "getting on better with people" will not work. These changes have to be made over time and that is where coaching helps. Coaching will enable you as a person to use your own skills, experience and talent much more effectively. I often say, and it sounds a terrible cliché, that coaching will enable you to build the life you currently only dream about.

Does coaching appeal to IT professionals?

I'm seeing more and more IT professionals looking at coaching. I think it particularly suits technically minded people, because - and this is possibly controversial - the technologically minded people I've met are deeply creative, very original, [have] very strong minds, [and] often highly individual takes on the world. [But] because of their aptitude for technology they have often not focused much on human relations, so there is often a lop sidedness to the way they've developed. I can help correct that very quickly.

How so?

I can deliver a systems approach to a technologically minded person that relates to human relations. The people in this field are clever and have a very experimental attitude to life. In the computer world, you can not just sit there and work things out; you have to do something and see what happens, work out why it worked, and then fine tune it. That relates to coaching, you talk, come up with a plan of action and see how it works then think of ways to do it better.

Can you explain the coaching process?

Step one is you find out what the client or group is doing at the moment. How do they construe the activity, how do they think about what they are doing? Then you need a good model for how to improve. If you are coaching technological people you need a model you can propose to them that will make sense to them as a better way of doing it – a best practice model. Then you construct a first step to implement that best practice model and they commit to doing it. And if they come back and it has made a positive change they realise it works and look at the next step.

What would the steps typically entail?

Imagine someone who in the course of the first conversation [with their coach] says they get impatient because they know what people are going to say before they say it. In that case you challenge it and find out during the hour whether that is the case. There is then a three level model that covers hearing, listening, and meaning. It shows that you have to attend to every word people say and the most trivial things people say often have the most meaning. Once they see that they realise letting someone speak and thinking deeply about the words they use are very important. I might suggest that as their action: to concentrate on everything people say and come back and tell me what is different.

What kind of impact can coaching IT professionals have?

IT professionals are providing real value, they are doing fantastic stuff and are at the heart of modern businesses. So if you can coach IT people successfully they see massive benefits very quickly. If you can help improve an IT manager's human relations, immediately that helps the IT department and the business and also delivers massive personal benefits. A lot of the people I work with end up getting big promotions.

Practically what benefits do firms realise?

I can give you an example, I did a year coaching the IT management team at Daimler Chrysler Financial Services and my client there said when I started the Department could do four major projects simultanesouly. A year later they were managing twenty projects. That is a five fold increase in capacity and it was down to coaching. They worked better as teams, understood better what clients wanted, they worked better with stakeholders, they worked better with suppliers, they used their time more effectively, they were happier, they had more fun, they saw more creative opportunities, they were more skilled at negotiation and influencing – it all had an impact.

How big an investment is it to coach a group or individual?

Compared to buying one piece of kit giving someone ten hours coaching is a drop in the ocean. And think about the benefits: imagine you take someone who has everything else [to do their job], but they don’t know how to listen. Listening is one of the most complex skills - it is a real time skill where you have to fathom what people are saying as people often don’t say what they mean. Imagine in six hours a person goes from being zero to a very acute listener. They’re going to benefit, their peers and colleagues are going to benefit, their boss is going to benefit, and their customers are going to benefit.

Can you give a practical example of these benefits?