Why managers must be coaches too

Ruchira Chaudhary places the burden of coaching, not on her ilk, but on operating managers. That is a laudable aim.

This is a highly readable book on a subject that is thought to be specialised, but, in fact, is far from being so. The book is aimed at operating managers and not at coaching specialists or HR professionals. Given the shortening attention spans of potential readers, perhaps the book could have been crisper; however, being anecdotal, it holds the reader’s interest. In short, buy it, read it and keep it around. The book has 13 chapters arranged in three parts covering the what, the how and the application of coaching.
 
Ruchira Chaudhary is a professional on the subject. Yet, she places the burden of coaching, not on her ilk, but on operating managers. That is a laudable aim. After all, what is the role of any manager or leader? It is principally to develop people  — apart from developing technologies, understanding consumers, or minding the finances. In the real world, line managers operate as if developing people is the job of HR and behave as if their own role is to do the more important things. This widely prevalent malaise is rightly questioned by Ms Chaudhary through her arguments and stories.

 
Through my 50 years of corporate experience, I can confirm her view. I have been involved with identifying or recruiting at least 300 potential leaders during the last several years both in Unilever and Tata. I have found that the “average personal-brilliance plus high people-relationships” leaders perform vastly better than the “high personal-brilliance plus average people-relationships” variety.
 

Fantastic cricketers do not necessarily make great captains: Sachin Tendulkar being an example. Fabulous technologists do not make great entrepreneurs: William Shockley, for example. High intellectuals do not make great teachers: Albert Einstein, for example. On the flipside, great leaders may not be brilliant individually— for example, Sourav Ganguly, MS Dhoni and Arjuna Ranatunga in cricket, Angela Merkel in Germany, and Abdul Kalam in science.

 
In short, as the book states, leadership is not about “supremely talented super chickens, rather it is about character and credentials.” The author avers that “super chickens often have personality traits that do not work well with others… they are poor collaborators… being top performers, company resources are often directed their way.”
 
Once I asked a former chairman of Unilever about how he would judge the effectiveness of his succession planning. I was startled by his reply. “I wait to see whether my successor’s successor is considered successful. If yes, I might have done something right,” he said.

 
His response reminded me of what Gandhiji had said, “A sign of good leaders is not how many followers you have, but how many leaders you create.”
 
The author writes, “As an executive coach myself, I do believe that our efforts can complement but never substitute that of the leader ... it is what they should do…so that it gets embedded in the very DNA of the organization.” Embedding leadership development into the DNA shows up in some companies: Hindustan Unilever, Tata Consultancy, Asian Paints, Tata Steel, Titan Industries, to name a few. The book proposes a model of the 4 Cs of coaching: Capability, consciousness, clarity and confidence. It emphasises that coaching is a continuous process to be done by the leader, not something to be undertaken at the time of annual performance appraisal; also, the book makes the crucial point that an employee should seek and be receptive to coaching signals from the boss by stating, “The best kind of feedback according to Gallup is the kind you seek…proactively seek feedback from your manager….”

 
If all this is so credible and logical, why is it not the norm among companies and not practised frequently? The author appropriately quotes management academics Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular: “Coaching feels soft and intangible because it denies managers their most familiar management practice — asserting their authority.” How can a square-jawed, blue eyed, tough-talking leader do squishy stuff like coaching?
 
Recently, along with five academics from Bhavan’s SPJIMR, I participated in an applied research project on what distinguishes the mindset and behaviour of shapers of Indian business institutions from those of the good leaders of good companies? Our research team studied HDFC (Deepak Parekh), L&T (AM Naik), Biocon (Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw), Kotak Mahindra Bank (Uday Kotak), Marico (Harsh Mariwala) and TCS (FC Kohli and S Ramadorai). An overarching finding was that in such organisations, people development has been embedded institutionally. The leaders, whom we talked to, spent as much as 25-40 per cent of their conscious time on people — not just employees, but people among all stakeholders! Quite stunning, because this embedded leadership practice distinguished these “institutions” from the practice among many foreign companies and run-of-the-mill Indian companies. Their top priority was people: Not digitisation, artificial intelligence, technology, or government relations.

 
And it is this well-known truth that Ms Chaudhary covers in the 350-plus pages of her book.