Magazine: State of Coaching in Organisations

In my thought leadership role in the UK chapter of the ICF, I get to speak to many coaches through the series and at the fantastic events that our local and special interest groups organise. And there is a constant at the top of the list of coaches: Where do you unearth the next clients from?

Once fresh out of their qualifications, coaches are ready to go and have much to offer, often after many years of complex study and a substantial financial outlay. Yet the qualifications don't automatically bring the clients. There starts the ungrateful journey of convincing people to jump into coaching. Coaches often aim to achieve this by establishing their voice in the market, engaging on LinkedIn, and diligently capturing their thoughts in regular blogs.

So, when we organised the Business Development Series, which started earlier in the year, we thought we would give a sense of the market, and I set up to stimulate ideas on how the coaching market was evolving. I work in business change and use a new(ish) technique for mapping strategies - called Wardley Maps. Maps are fantastic for capturing landscape dynamics. So, it was an excellent occasion to put those into practice.

As a starting point, I must remind everybody that you rarely market-make. We often have a misconception of strategy, inherited from seeing strategy as a power play. In the early mass-market dynamics, strategies were about power: Power to advertise and gain market share, power to scale across regions, power to produce en masse and keep costs in check.

Winning was about out-powering the competition. But in the last decade, we have seen many cases of David outsmarting Goliath, with startups growing exponentially and Corporations surrounding market share or margins. In times of change, like in the digital economy, being small and nimble helps the win. Could this help our independent coaches figure out their strategy?

As an independent, it is challenging to power-play. It is essential to realise that you fit into a market landscape. You win by playing where the market needs and demand align with your offering. It is like when playing chess; moves only make sense in the context of the board.

The following article is structured in three main sections:

• An outline of the technique called Wardley Maps to get you to a sufficient understanding to comprehend the rest. You may skip this part if you are already familiar with the approach,
• A view of the landscape today, what is changing in it, and what it means for you as a coach,
• A view of emerging opportunities in coaching in organisations and leadership development and how you may benefit from those opportunities as a coach.

It is worth noting that the following predominantly looks at one use-case of coaching in organisations, as it is one prime channel of coaching services. Other use cases would need to be mapped to view the overall landscape. You are welcome to map your particular landscape.

High-level education to Wardley Maps 

Please see Figure 1. A Wardley Map is arranged on two axes. The Y-axis maps the value chain arranged by visibility to the end-user with aspects more directly recognised by the end-user (e.g. services they directly interact with) high up and things that are more foundational lower down. Once the value chains are arranged in terms of visibility, the items are moved according to the X-axis based on their current evolutionary state.

Here, we are using a maturity scale of :

• Concept: Something novel, new ideas, early experimental practice,
• Emergent: Something tailored and explicitly adapted to the situation,
• Convergent: Something that is standardising/normalising through repetition and may be packaged repetitively,
• Common/Scale: Something is consolidating as a common offering, and is scaling.

Figure 1 - The Landscape of a Wardley Map 

Wardley Maps enable you to visualise the value chains. You can recognise where you play into your clients' value chains. You can also design the value chains that underpin your services (please see the Whitepaper on Strategy-for-Self referenced below). The parts of a value chain are connected and generally interdependent. Higher-order features tend to offer differentiation. Lower-level elements enable the upper parts.

Strategies are about the movements of the components. The nature of evolution is to move from the left to the right: Something novel naturally progresses to become a recognised practice and even a scalable standard if there is a market for it. The strategies consist of being quicker to scale when the market is ready. Evolution also happens from right to left. As something gets consolidated, it opens the space for new possibilities to emerge.

Figure 2 uses a simple example to help you understand a map. Many people tend to use the cup of tea, but as a Continental, I am a coffee drinker, and I find that example more demonstrative.

Figure 2 - Mapping a Cup of Coffee

Getting a nice coffee (following the dark blue lines): 

As a coffee drinker, I like a nice cup of coffee. I like my cup of coffee made by a skilled Barista who will employ craft and care to make it. They will use their select blend of coffee and a professional cafetiere, which runs on the standard commodities of electricity power and water. You can follow the value chains and the maturity of the components. Here, there is differentiation in the craftmanship.

The strategic evolution (following the red lines): 

I also would like a nice cup of coffee at home, and since the pandemic, I have been working considerably more from home. So, now convenience has become very important to me. I need a solution that I can operate at home. Nespresso made some machines that produce decent coffee from their capsules with different blends called "Grand Crus", like fine wines. Now, I can have a decent cup of coffee at home, and a "Convergent" offering is replacing the Barista.

Based on the success of this format, other providers have created generic machines, and coffee brands have started to offer their coffee in the same pod format. The market is commoditising, allowing it to scale.

New possibilities (following the pale blue lines): 

With this market change, what happens to my skilful Barista? Are they now redundant? If they don't recognise this evolution, they will probably be indeed. They can go on more courses to become even more skilful, but it won't change matters.

However, if they follow the evolution, they may be able to offer their secret coffee blend in the generic format of the pods. That way, I can have a bit of that unique blend seven days a week. For the Barista, they can also scale thereon.

It is an elementary example, yet you can probably see metaphors starting to percolate if you replaced the Barista with a coach.

The state of coaching in organisations 

Figure 3 - Current state map of coaching in organisations

Here, we are dealing with a more complicated map in Figure 3:

• Businesses need innovation and to keep their costs in check.
• Leaders play an essential hinging role in establishing the strategy and organising its best execution. They have a crucial lever of people performance management and compensation (bonuses, promotion).
• Given the criticality of their role, leaders have benefited from development programmes and leadership coaching. Those programmes are generally administered by Human Resources (HR), also called People Success. Some coaches offer such training programmes as packaged services.
• Coaches connect with leaders based on relationships. Agencies also hold such relationships and help with match-making. Coaches aim to build a reputation with social media, but turning reputation into relationships takes a lot of effort.
• Employees are assessed through an annual appraisal process and some profiling tools. Some employees can access coaching when considered high-potential or when performing poorly and being on a Performance Improvement Plan.
• During COVID and lockdowns, organisations got concerned about the resilience of their workforce (primarily through times of great resignation). As such, many looked to commission coaching across their population, talking about mental well-being. It accelerated the development of platforms and coaching at scale. It opened up opportunities with more needs for coaches, yet it came with the by-consequence of cheaper rates.
• The attraction of platforms is also that, for the first time, the digital underpinnings enable the generation of measurements.
• Lastly, the consolidation process is bound to continue progressing with levels of coaching automation using AI. It is likely that the first "robo-coaches" will emerge from the assessments, which offer a degree of structure and narratives already in place.

Here, we are dealing with a more complicated map in Figure 3:

• Once convenience enters a market, it tends to set a new norm. From a parallel perspective, it is why Amazon is doing so well, and the high streets are dying. Amazon redefined convenience from the nearest town centre to your doorstep. Platforms take the problem away from sourcing coaches and managing individual agreements. They are likely to stay for volume coaching, and coaches may consider working for those, albeit at a lower rate than they would have imagined.
• Traditional coaching is likely to continue for high-end coaching. The phenomenon of consolidation drags much of the market and only leaves behind the niches. High-end Executive coaching and specialist areas will remain. But the pool is that much smaller and harder to get to. Also not represented on this map is the increase in in-house coaches, where the whole ecosystem is drastically simplified. It means it is harder and harder for independent coaches to find work with sizeable organisations as independents, no matter how diligent they are at taking a voice in social media. The best bet is to nurture their relationships and word of mouth.

As mentioned at the start of this article, you may work very hard to drive your success. But you are very unlikely to market-make. Understanding the dynamic at play allows making the best decisions in the landscape. When a market is commoditising, you must go along with the ride or find how to play your niche. As I hinted at the start of our Barista example, with consolidation at one end, novel possibilities tend to emerge, and that's what we'll explore further in this article.

Reading the signs of change

One aspect to notice on the map is how individuality still prevails in organisations:

• Leaders have a central role in strategy, best execution and performance management,
• Leaders work with levers on the individuals to achieve performance, with objective setting, appraisals, and compensation.

It makes up for systems that are, at best, the sum of the parts. And that's if all the parts nicely add up. Once "healthy competition" takes place and politics plays out, it is often far from being the case. Many parts will cancel out, and some sums will turn negative instead.

Figure 4 - Signs of Change 

It seems paradoxical to the desire from the said organisations for more collaboration. Working on a change programme, I had a discussion with a strategy software asking them to set the accountability at the team level. That was novel for them. Most of their clients would only conceive accountability at the individual level: The famous "there is no accountability unless somebody's head is on the block with it"... Those organisations don't see the irony of commissioning "psychological safety" programmes when thinking that way!... Changing this thinking and developing a new leadership culture is precisely what the change is about.

How organisations are changing with digital 

Digital change has long progressed as a technology acquisition exercise. Many organisations failed to recognise that digital was, in fact, a recalibration of the ways of working. Digital is essentially bringing technology into business value chains and, with it, many more possibilities for disruption and threats for being disrupted.

Figure 5 - Map of the new systemic dynamic of organisations

If we now progress to a new map, available in Figure 5, we are looking at a new corporate landscape:

• The factors of cost control are still there from the previous maps. Businesses need to keep their costs in check, always.
• We have kept the landscape of the consolidated coaching on platforms and the likelihood of emerging automation around assessments and early AI tools. From a coaching perspective, those align well with the need for cost control, offering keenly priced session rates.
• Human Resources is renamed to People Success, as is often the case.
• Digital business performance relies on customer engagement from experience and innovation. Because finding the right mix is complex, it requires progressing in agile cycles, closely connecting the strategy and its execution (here represented in what we call a "pipeline"). Strategy is no longer linear but iterative and informed through its genuine progress and customer feedback.
• Achieving such operating capability requires leaning into the system and bringing more autonomy of decisions where the execution happens. It involves intentionality about collaboration and alignment.
• We shall also point out that in digital and, more broadly, Knowledge Work, compensation alone is not the primary motivator anymore. People look for intrinsic motivation as a mix of being inspired, working well with others, contributing, and making an impact.
• Many will have noticed how leadership has dropped below the teams on this map. The leadership moves from organising and coordinating from the front to enabling the teams to coherently fast-cycle the learnings from strategy into execution from the back seat.
• It is a significant change as it turns the governance of organisations upside down. Many organisations are still struggling through this if the relative disappointment of Agile transformations is anything to go by.

New "Systemic" possibilities for coaches

This changing landscape opens new opportunities for coaches, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6 - The emerging systemic opportunity 

As organisations progress through their need for alignment, they must rethink how collaboration and coherence are maintained across the system. It is a fine line between providing sufficient focus for the overall system to pull in the same direction yet leaving room for emergent serendipity, which may pave the way to innovation.

The abovementioned challenge of accountability is genuine. It is about bringing accountability into the teams and at a systemic level, requiring a different leadership style: Systemic Leadership. With it, the classic leadership programmes need recalibrating, opening new possibilities for coaches with Systemic Coaching.

ICF now recognises this form of coaching with the ACTC credential: Advanced Certification in Team Coaching. Even if systemic considerations go beyond only coaching teams, this credential is a sign of imminent movement on the map. Organisations have inertia in progressing change, so it will not materialise overnight, but if I were a betting man, that's where I would see the growth in the profession.

It is also a space where the Platforms will struggle to step in, and AI does not have much to go regarding training models. So, this space should offer the potential for some time to come.

Conclusion: "All maps are wrong"

As I explained the landscape of the above maps, I am confident you would have objected to some of the views and positions. And that is fine. Simon Wardley, the strategy maps' creator, says that maps are all wrong. They are an imprecise representation of the reality. But they are helpful in navigation and strategy, and that is what matters.

It is also why mapping strategy tends to be a collaborative exercise, which brings diverse perspectives into the mix, reduces biases and offers better insights. I would encourage you to try it for yourself from the references below.

One essential piece of advice to remember is that you do not make the market, especially as an independent. You are an actor in it. With a better understanding of the dynamics in play, you can reflect on where you may play to your best advantage.

References: 

• Strategy-for-Self: A whitepaper exploring the use of Wardley Maps in career coaching.
• Simon Wardley book: Free 19-chapter reference book on Medium and many blogs looking at different situations.
• Book: Systems Inspired Leadership - Marita Fridjohn and Frank Uit de Weerd

Philippe Guenet

ICF PCC and ACTC - ORSC-C

Change and Performance Coach in Business

Director of Thought Leadership in UK ICF

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