Those of us involved in our own professional development journeys know that very little development is achieved personally in an organizational setting without help and support. These helping and supporting systems in organizations have long been served through human resources using psychology and consulting. Yet, with the advent of increasing complexity and the demands from a global wave of competitiveness, we are seeing a new wave of solutions being added to the current helping and support systems once the domain of only human resources.

.... If development consists of structural changes, any new structure constitutes a break from the old one. It cannot be obtained by adding or subtracting [i.e., in a mechanistic way, O.L.], but only by establishing a new principle governing the relations among the parts.

This new genre of development solutions is not coming from increased use of consultants but from an old discipline (Aristotle coached Alexander the Great!) being popularized—COACHING! It is through this recognition of human capital being as valuable as financial, knowledge, network and customer capital that strategic leadership is required.

Harvard Business Review reported,

What Sears found was that for every improvement in employee attitudes that took place, a corresponding improvement in customer satisfaction and resultant profit was realized in the system.

Sears realized that people strategy was no longer just the domain of HR, but important across all functions and the strategic case (Chief Coaching Officer) for elevating "people & development" to the highest levels of leadership in organizations is enhanced. It is not just about benefits, performance and administration anymore. It is about a person’s capacity for development to take on richer levels of responsibility in the organization.

Coaching as a form of communication is a leadership linguistic. In other words, leadership has a choice about how it leads and what methods of communication are used to get results.

Yet, how does a leader get results? By exchanging information and facilitating relationships with people. Effective leadership is not what we know, but what we notice. It is not just what we see, but how we listen. It is not what we hear, but what we understand. In order to begin to move to higher levels of development that allow us to fully understand, embrace and value others—towards getting results—we have to develop emotional competence concurrently with an understanding of the competitive market environment.

In both cases, coaching can create the circumstances for development. The idea is to build capability, not foster consultative and management co-dependencies that focus strictly on behavior modification. Development can only be done in supportive and appreciative interactions that involve deep penetration of long-held assumptions about reality. These mental models [Senge, 1990] are ingrained deeply, often holding us back from reaching the next level of development. Leaders today must not be subject to their own reality maps, but must be able to hold them as object.

What is required of modern leadership at almost all levels is the ability to take a perspective other than your own. "We must be able to sit in the midst of multiple perspectives" and be able to synthesize multiple viewpoints, interests, agendas and needs.

Yet, how do we fill this tall order? And why should strategic leadership even be concerned with things like emotional competence, development and multiple perspectives? Aren’t we interested in only results, after all is said and done? Where is the link from development and capability to results the marketspace rewards?

These are questions that need to be answered in order to move from hard to soft and back to hard again. The line between personal freedom and business reality is as impenetrable as ever. As we attempt to see through the limiting barrier--of integrating the person and the work--we discover coaching is a methodology that allows for the synthesis of each—personal and business realities.

Yet, how do we keep the complications of our personal lives from showing up at work? How do we separate our personal life path from our administrative protocols, legal defenses, document nightmares and management by objectives?

A crucial question that every Chief Coaching Officer will have to address; where does the person stop and the business begin or vice versa? How are personal issues that affect people being addressed at work? Often by lower productivity. On the other hand, how are work issues affecting our lives? You see whether we recognize it or not, the whole person is showing up at work! It is an issue and it is playing itself out in productivity and well-being—paradise lost or gained?

In coaching, the real effectiveness is seen through the increase in productivity around interpersonal relationships, emotional competence and innovation. As an organization, speed and agility in ambiguous environments creates competitive advantage. What’s the big difference you say? The difference is simply—iterations. If a person can iterate more quickly with higher quality efficiency, they become capable of serving more demands in a specific time frame. Anything that slows iteration will become less efficient over time and that is why business coaching has a leg up on consulting because it works at the level of "iteration potential" seen from the interpersonal perspective.

If a person is more emotionally competent, they are more then likely to perform at a higher level for a variety of reasons indicated in the research, but something not alluded to are iteration speed and viscosity. If I get along with people better and they with me, there is less defensive energy used ( Model II Values, Argyris, 1974), less time between decisions and greater ownership and buy-in of decisions made by leadership. This iteration potential is leveraged due to lower interpersonal viscosity and is critical to achieving lower system viscosity and decreased cycle times--increasing speed and organizational agility. Interpersonal acumen and the capacity to take multiple perspectives—indicative of higher levels of development—increases the number, speed and quality of iterations possible in any given frame—space and time.

This critical difference between consulting where overcoming resistance, filling gaps, selling, defensiveness and intervention are seen to be the norm as opposed to appreciation (asset-based rather then deficiency-based), support and development is why coaching will continue to diffuse more quickly into agile organizations.

Improving the viscosity of an organization from a procedural and value-chain perspective has been around for years, because we saw a direct link between viscosity/flow and leverage. Now that we know how to improve yet another area of viscosity, it will be a matter of time before the field explodes because we have provided a "practical bottom-line payback" tool that can influence people in decision-making roles to allocate resources to coaching, e.g. improving cycle time.

Our problem is not in getting results, but in allocating those results to the proper causes in order to allocate resources more efficiently. As we begin to find ways to measure innovation speed, agility and iteration capacity in organizations, we can then begin to speak the language of the hard-money resource-allocators!

We now have more increasingly hard data when we apply the research of emotional intelligence, developmental coaching and viscosity rules to measuring the speed of iteration, which leads innovation cycles, time to market, market to innovation, and organizational alignment and agility. Coaching is here to stay because it integrates multiple perspectives across systems through conversations that are designed to center on what really matters. It will become more differentiated over time as we integrate the process of coaching with the content required to move people ahead faster in terms of performance, change and transformation. Even Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM stated, "If you want to double your success rate, double your failure rate."

For the foreseeable future knowledge worker productivity within and attached to an organizational system will be a critical area of focus. Leverage will come from how it plays out across organizations, communities, cultures and markets. In essence, the effects of coaching are directly measured as productivity and are increasing returns.

Each strategic investment in human capital has the potential to yield increasing returns. In comparison, each additional input into financial capital is subject to the domain of diminishing returns because other forms of capital are not often self-generating and self-developing as is human capital in the right system. Development leads to taking multiple perspectives, building better relationships with subordinates, peers and customers. Better relationships improve productivity, innovation, cycle time, speed and profits. [Sears, 1998]

So, here are the players in what really matters: leadership, communication, emotional competence, development, productivity, innovation and growth with capital attraction in a domain of increasing returns. Capital comes in four basic forms: network, human, financial and customer—all contributing to iteration potential and capacity.

An effective way to integrate leadership complexity and align organizations is through a leadership system that uses coaching. Coaching is one methodology and structure that focuses appreciatively on developing multiple perspectives, improving performance and fostering generative change and transformation. This is accomplished through creating the space for the emergence of human potential led by intrinsic motivation.

By linking what really matters to organizational right action—the right people, doing the right things, in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons. Coaching changes an organization directly and indirectly through leadership and diffusion around what is important.

Executives are not the only ones dealing with complexity. In fact, Peter Drucker recently indicated; "managers need to start thinking like executives!" Take a customer service representative sitting at the phone dealing with your customer. Do they need to be able to take the perspective of the company, the customer and themselves into consideration? Do they need emotional intelligence to do their $7.50 an hour job? Do you realize they represent you and the lifetime value of each and every customer every time they pick up a call? How are we going to afford to have emotional competence at every level in the organization? How can we afford not to?

This question is not one we will be able to avoid. As sophistication in all forms—customer, product, value, stakeholder, leadership, market, culture—begins to infiltrate every business transaction, emotional competence, development and performance will dictate results in real time; over time. The time to begin to think about coaching from a strategic point of view is long past and the time to elevate coaching to the highest decision-making levels in an organization is staring us directly in our leadership face.

If increasing returns, productivity and getting desired results are what really matters to leadership, then we have to create a strategic connection or conversation across systems that is integrated into the lives and work of people.