1. The Emerging Role of The Internal Coach
Sara Hope and Louise Buckle

2. Outline for Today The evolving market Defining ‘internal coach’
Purpose of the role
Attributes required for an internal coach to be effective
The opportunities and challenges for internal coaches
Critical success factors
The role of professional bodies in supporting internal coaches
Discuss:
Structure of internal coaching
Your practice
How supervised and managed

3. The Evolving Market
Organisations looking to create in-house coaching capability
Costs of coaching
Internal coaches understand culture, business strategy, people, politics
Internal coaching as part of coaching culture
Coaching can be spread more widely within the organisation
Louise – Partner go with internal coach – cost, started conversation so why would I go external? We know the promotion system, the people, networks – mentoring that add’s value.
Some mentoring type relationship in internal coaching relationships, but we watch that and switch between roles carefully.

4. Defining Internal Coach
What is an internal coach?
A definition: “a one-to-one development intervention supported by the organisation and provided by a colleague of those coached who is trusted to shape and deliver a programme yielding individual and professional growth.” (Frisch, 2001)
Confusing terminology
Tensions:

5. The Purpose of the Role
No definitive guidelines – appears to be organisation specific
Connected to wider Business/Learning & Development strategy
Suggestion agenda may be restricted by organisation framework
Delivery of skills, performance and development coaching
In KPMG the framework has been largely talent – supporting our best. Some remedial – but more associated with how to become successful here. Ambitious people – natural focus on career, but also blind-spots around leadership and as its a non-corporate environment we are all leaders and so its crucial to our peope that we can all support and develop and use a coaching style at times. So coaching can be about supporting that style of leadership.

6. Internal Coaching Models
What are the different ways internal coaching is being expressed within organisations?

7. Effective Internal Coach
Attributes required
Effective Internal Coach
Technical Skills
Organisational Understanding
Experience
Credibility
Training and
Development
Recruitment
Louise – credibility being commercial important and think about business opportunities.
Reference business – demonstrate you ‘get’ the business.
The role/title got credibility in KPMG – trust not been betrayed. When other people can’t help me, you can.
Downside – where it’s lost it, where the coach has come in with their agenda eg WLB and partner not wanted this OR coached moved into L&D space. Importance of being explicit – I’m here as a coach
Qualifications
Professionalisation

8. The Opportunities/Challenges Relating to Internal Coaching
What are the opportunities/challenges for an organisation employing internal coaches?
What are the opportunities/challenges facing an internal coach?
What are the issues you need to manage to ensure internal coaches can operate effectively?
Notes from Louise:
Being an internal coach you have to be more disciplined as coach to say within the boundaries and structure. You really have to live by your reputation.
Way you manage your time internally is very different, practice shortened, operating in office structure.
Doing deeper development work more challenging, tend to do more behavioural career work.
Completely different set of experiences, is it full/part time, where located in business/central/HR/business.
How role graded compared to all others.
Are you given clients or do you find clients – impact on how you’re able to operate.
How performance managed and how your time is accounted for.
Contracting different – different kinds of conversation

9. Critical Success Factors
Exploring and clarifying the purpose of the role
Alignment of the role to the wider OD and coaching agenda
Recruitment, training, supervision and on-going development
Managing trust and confidentiality
Managing stakeholder understanding
Acknowledging subjectivity and ambiguity
Louise
Measurement – depends on whether tough times
Way forward isn’t to measure – its to say what do you want to see happen next year? More planning.
Strategic business needs and what strategic coaching need might be.
Start with whats on the agenda, what issues facing and how coaching can help.
How much it will cost, how can we prioritise?
Therefore changes every year, development of offer, connects with business.
Business Mindset – coaching is an individual activity. KPMG got individuals rather than a coaching service which you draw from so in some sense it’s more authentic to what coaching is about.
Geography – notion that personal anxiety, will they choose me? What would happen to our relationship with a client if they chose from 15 faces on a website compared with if located within a business?

10. The Future
Louise – is IC poor relation? Could argue better outcome than external? Depends on what coaching is for. Exec development for individual. If coaching is behavioural aligned to our values – systemic effect.
Purpose rather than what
Range/place for different types of coaching – types/levels.
Importance of developing coaching strategy and getting clear on what you want to achieve.
KPMG promoting associate coaching model – specific pockets ie impact/maternity coaching.
Externals used with more senior staff. Challenges re value of each type of coaching.