Organizational Politics Questionnaire

HOW TO IMPLEMENT AN EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE COACHING STRATEGY   by Sandip Saha

Keeping Cinderella’s coach from turning into a pumpkin HR managers often assume that the purpose of coaching is to increase managers’ performance. However, our survey of participants attending a pilot coaching session in the OWP revealed that this is not what executives want.
The difference between coaches, mentors and managers
Executive coaching initiatives fail in part because the distinction between the role of manager, mentor and coach is not well understood. Each can each help executives meet their principal objectives–life development, leadership and self-awareness–but a manager, a mentor and a coach are not the same things.
Managers
A manager occupies a formal role within an organization and is responsible for ensuring that the primary tasks of the team/department/business unit/corporation are met. A manager can use coaching skills to informally coach a subordinate, but this “coaching” is in the service of the subordinate’s organizational task.
Mentors
A mentor occupies a close interpersonal role and helps guide a protégé’s corporate career choices. A mentor can be a formally designated role or an informally acquired one. Formal mentors help their protégé understand the organization and support their journey within it, with the assumption of a long-term career in the company.
Coach
A coach is concerned with deep personal and professional development–the emphasis is on personal. The most effective coaches are external to the company, where they are independent of organizational pressure and political influence and free to offer more-or-less objective counsel and guidance.
The engineering and clinical approaches to executive coaching
Most corporate executive coaching initiatives take an engineering approach to human behavior using a conscious, rational and concrete approach. This method identifies areas for improvement and then applies tools, processes and procedures to increase performance.
Questions to ask
- How might I benefit from executive coaching?
- How might my company benefit from coaching?
- How can I integrate executive coaching? Team coaching? Peer coaching?
- How do I understand the difference between an “engineering” and a “clinical” approach to behavioral coaching?
Based on article written by Professor Jack Denfeld Wood in Oct. 2008
Jack Denfeld Wood teaches Orchestrating Winning Performance and Building on Talent at IMD.

QUESTIONNAIRES AREN’T ENOUGH
While the individuals sponsoring executive education want to see direct results, many in the HR community are satisfied by simply observing the program development and participating in the learning process during the program itself. Many rely on post-program evaluations by the executives who participated. As one human resources manager said: “Evaluations by participants at the end of a program remove any doubt about its impact.” As the literature shows, though, such questionnaires are at best poor measures of a program’s true impact.
For HR executives, the alternative is unthinkable. The impact of an executive education program depends on many pre- and post-program activities. Measuring that impact makes HR responsible for those activities, many of which are difficult to measure and outside of HR’s control–an uncomfortable situation for any executive.
However, theoretical evidence suggests that behavioral changes at the workplace require multiple points of reflection, multiple sources of feedback, linking a program’s learning to an organizational necessity such as project work, linking program learning outcomes to internal company systems, and providing a supportive technology infrastructure for networking.

About the Author

Executive coachinginitiatives fail in part because the distinction between the role of manager, mentor and coach is not well understood. Each can each help executives meet their principal objectives–life development, leadership and self-awareness–but a manager, a mentor and a coach are not the same things.

Dissemination & Implementation Conference: Day 2 11:15-12:00

Organizational Politics Questionnaire