In the Face of Adversity
Survey finds leaders aren’t getting the support they need
Business owners and leaders today continue to fight for the survival of their companies and protect the jobs of their people.
How does the individual leader find support in what is probably their most critical leadership mandate?
Not long after the pandemic set in, it became abundantly clear that leaders were going to need support. People were being tested like never before, facing a myriad of unprecedented situations and decisions.
The pressure on leaders was immense, and unrelenting. Now, months later, it drags on. The pressures and situations may be different, there is still uncertainty and stress and seemingly without end. Leadership today is especially lonely, acutely tumultuous and incredibly hard.
I’ve written before about the importance of seeing a silver lining — the real strength and resilience in optimism, and how that mindset is empowering for me and my clients. We not only help leaders focus and grow, but we can be a valuable and objective sounding board.
I was curious: in the face of this adversity, would others see that, too?
I turned to Knorket, a company that helps businesses leverage data and insight to make critical decisions. Knorket created and analyzed an online survey of attitudes toward leadership coaching today.
Nine out of 10 leaders agreed that coaching would help with their success, while even more — 95 per cent of respondents — believe that coaching would contribute to the growth and financial performance of their organization.
Yet, I knew from another poll that 86 per cent of entrepreneurs were not currently working with a coach. And further probing with this survey were also telling: When asked if they personally plan to invest in coaching in the next six to 18 months or if they believe their organization will, slightly less than half the leaders agreed they would, and one-third were uncertain that their organization would.
I asked Venkat Chandra, Knorket’s founder, for his thoughts. With a long and diverse career as an entrepreneur, a management consultant and performance manager, I was curious about his view of not only the findings but his view of the leadership landscape today.
“Many leaders are struggling, many managers are struggling. They’re trying to make sense of what and how to handle this extremely stressful period. If you are, for example, in the retail business, the entire business model is changing and rapidly,” he told me.
When things are good, coaching helps. But when things are bad and are dramatically changing, it helps even more. Organizations that have a vision of the future, the ones that have a medium- to longer term view of the world, will invest more now in leadership and organizational development priorities like coaching. The organizations that are looking to just survive are going to invest less, if at all, than they were pre-COVID.”
As someone who values the importance of data in decision-making and results, I wanted to source hard numbers on the ROI of coaching.
I turned to Dave Veale, founder and CEO of Vision Coaching Inc., who has examined the returns to organizations and leaders of investing in coaching services. He shared with me some studies of the impact coaching has had on some leading organizations. Two stood out for me.
A demonstrated return on investment
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center recruited a coaching firm to help it coach some of its managers. An evaluation of the effort found a return of $4.2 million US on the health care centre’s investment in coaching — 39 times its upfront investment.
Another return on investment study looked at the impact leadership coaching had on an undisclosed Fortune 500 firm that had launched an innovative leadership development effort to accelerate the development of next-generation leaders. The study found that coaching produced a 529 per cent return on investment.
In this changed world, employees are especially emotionally vulnerable, and the ability to be a successful leader is really about how you connect and interact with people in a flexible way so that you’re appealing to a diverse group of people.
The Center for Creative Leadership notes that 70 per cent of leadership is realized on the job, with 20 percent from developmental relationships and 10 per cent from coursework or training.
Is coaching the answer for you? Use these criteria to assess your investment in coaching:
- You have something important to realize and haven’t been able to accomplish it on your own
- You have, or potentially need, more leadership capacity
- You need to assess your professional options and develop a plan
- Your performance has plateaued or diminished
- You see value in an accountability partner
- You see value in a thought partner
- Your long-term goals aren’t defined
Coaching, particularly leadership coaching, is uniquely positioned to influence that 70 percent by working with leaders in real-time to improve their leadership skills, to reach personal and professional goals, and to improve the effectiveness of the people they lead.
With this kind of evidence, particularly the remarkable return on investment, what is holding leaders back from making the investment?
