Current trends in the field of executive coaching – It’s here to stay!
I recently sat down for a conversation with Jeremy Foster, one of our favorite executive coaches to have a discussion around his executive coaching practice and how the business community is utilizing his services and I’m here to tell you folks, Coaching is here to stay! In this five-part blog series on Trends in Executive Coaching, Jeremy shares several compelling stories that will leave no doubt as to why coaching is here to stay.
What trends are you currently seeing in the field of executive coaching?
Jeremy Foster
Coaching as a whole is really exploding. In terms of trends, the market has literally doubled over the last eight years and adoption has grown across every business sector and I have seen that in my own practice. One reason for this growth and a second trend is the growing body of studies and evidence showing that coaching impacts the performance of leaders and also the businesses they lead. A few stats that I thought you’d find interesting, and they really tell the story. One is a Metrix Global study that executive coaching can have an 8X return on investment. And this is based on factors including increases in productivity and also employee retention, which, as you know, there’s a lot of cost associated with losing employees and hurting productivity and things like that.
A second study found that executive coaching not only impacts the leader, but also the teams and the organizations they lead. So, they found a 70% increase in individual performance. And I almost want to just stop right there. I mean, sure, you’re making an investment in executive coaching. But you’re not paying 70% of the employee’s salary for executive coaching. It’s a much smaller investment, but you’re getting 70% increase in productivity. That’s like that employee almost doubling.
But in addition to that, they found there was about a 50% increase in the team’s performance and the organization’s performance that leader leads. It’s like you’re adding 50% more output to the team as well, because that leader is making better use of their employees and empowering their employees to do better. And so, all of these good things happen.
Recently I had an opportunity to interview some of the employees of one of the leaders I coach, and they thanked me for the work I was doing with their leader because they see the difference in how their leader has changed. And so, I see that playing out as well.
Business is getting more complex every day and that is adding to the need for coaching. And there are a couple of recent issues to highlight. One is the pandemic which pushed us into this time of hybrid work environments, and many leaders are struggling to know how to manage in that new environment. A second issue that’s coming up is a rising new generation in the workforce. And that generation, I’m hearing this from many leaders, has a different mindset around work, you might say a different work ethic or a different way of approaching work, different attitudes and expectations around leadership and what leaders are supposed to provide for them. There’s a lot of intergenerational tension within companies right now. And then AI, of course, is bringing all kinds of different dynamics to industry. And then actually one other thing. With the new generation coming up, there’s a greater need for leaders to not only be excellent in their technical field, whether it be finance or marketing or whatever it is, they need to be stronger in the soft skills, they need to be able to collaborate, they need to be able to lead with empathy, they need to be able to be more inclusive and include different types of people and personalities into their team. And so many of the leaders that I coach are excellent operationally, but they are trying to build up some new interpersonal skills to help them thrive and get to the next level with their team. So those are some of the trends I see that are driving a need for more coaching.
One other stat I’ll mention just because I think it’s fascinating. They did a study that found that when employees do training exercises, they experience a 22% increase in productivity. And I thought that sounded pretty good. But when they added one on one coaching alongside the training, there was an 88% percent increase in productivity.
Coaching is like a multiplier, a 4X multiplier on the impact of training. And this made so much sense to me because it matched my own experience when I first had a coach, and this is almost a decade ago, but when I first got into coaching as a client, I told people I grew more in that one year of coaching than I had in all the training sessions I had sat through over the prior ten years. And if you think about it, a year of coaching could be 24 hours of coaching, it could be 2 hours a month for twelve months. A training exercise could be 24 hours, three days of 8 hour workshops; your 24 hours either way. But the three-day workshop, what happens is you get out of the workshop, you jump back into your day to day, you have a pile of email to catch up on and all these meetings and everything to catch up on. And within a few days you’ve lost the momentum and the inspiration and the content that you spent three days learning, and you might never get back to it. And what the coaching does is you get a little dose of the coaching and it’s heavier on practical application of the content to your situation, overcoming the barriers of implementing those new insights and accountability to follow through and apply the new concept, whatever it is, to your life. So that’s one reason I am a big advocate for coaching, because I feel like you get a little bit of it at a time as you need it, and you can stretch that investment of time and energy and expense over a longer period of time and see a transformation over that period.
