People seek out coaches for an infinite variety of reasons, but there are two typical coachees: people navigating some significant transition in their life or career -- such as Svanberg and Schultz -- and jerks who have at least some inkling that being a jerk is holding them back. After helping build Funrise Toy Corp., a Los Angeles toy manufacturer, from a startup in 1992 to a global business working with some of the biggest names in retailing, Martin Kruger turned to a coach last year to help him fix what he felt was an increasingly ineffective leadership style. He had the barking-orders-to-underlings part of his job down cold, but fell far short when it came to inspiring employees to follow him.
The coach interviewed five of Kruger's coworkers and came back with a devastating assessment. "I came off as nothing short of abusive." Today, Kruger is grateful for the "shock and awe" of that experience, because it woke him up to his own bad behavior, something he says only an outsider could have done.
Executive-coaching engagements typically cost upward of $10,000 per person over a set period of time and include several face-to-face sessions between coach and coachee, followed by email and telephone discussions. To help develop executives internally, rather than look for outsiders, companies are often more than happy to foot the bill to fix dysfunctional leaders.
But enterprising fast-trackers can and do shell out for their own advancement. Gerard van Grinsven, a vice president and regional manager for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., has spent "a couple of thousand" dollars out of his own pocket on a coach. "This is definitely worth the money I spent," he says, "if for no other reason than it has sped up the course of my own professional development." Ritz-Carlton is now in the midst of establishing an executive coaching program of its own. (No word on whether the hotel is paying him back for his advance scouting.)
As the price scale slides downward, though, the buyer should beware. Steven Morse, a 24-year-old literary publicist for Phenix & Phenix, an Austin PR firm, found a coach through the Yellow Pages just before graduating last year. He went to three 45-minute sessions with a career coach at $50 a pop. "She just gave me basic advice," he laments.
Many coaches say that their profession is best understood by what it's not. It's not a substitute for therapy. And it's not business strategy. Don't expect great epiphanies on a silver platter. Coaches say it's the clients who do the heavy lifting.
David Thomson, now a vice president at Hewlett-Packard, worked with an executive coach when he moved from a general manager role at Nortel Networks to a senior position focused squarely on sales. As with Svanberg, Thomson says the company didn't suggest coaching as any sort of punitive measure but rather to help him manage his transition into a role populated with "amiables," as he describes salespeople in the patois of personality typecasting. A coach, Thomson says, knows the right questions to ask, "but you're the one who ultimately has to figure out what behavior needs to change and how to change it."
Coachees tend to be a self-selecting audience, so the answer is usually yes. But not always. Michelle Tennant, who owns a small PR firm near Asheville, North Carolina, spent the better part of 12 years in one coaching program or another, trying to uncover her true calling. Finally she threw in the towel when a coach she found through the classified ads of the Utne Reader made romantic overtures over email. "After that, I was done with coaches."
The lesson, then, is that even true believers should maintain a guarded edge during the coaching profession's woolly growth phase. "If a coach can't handle your skepticism," says executive coach Marjan Bolmeijer, "then by all means, throw them out."
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