By Suman Tarafdar

What led you to take up coaching? What have been some of the most significant milestones in your journey?

I must admit coaching was not a profession I had ever explored. In late 2013, I had just exited a large financial services firm where I was in a leadership role, a part of me deeply disillusioned by the toxic work culture. I think by now I had great clarity about the kind of organisations I did not want to work for again.

I was deeply fascinated with coaching, but never considered becoming one myself for it was neither my forte nor work specialization. However, what encouraged me to consider the University of Chicago Booth School of Business executive education programme offer was the fact that my clients and senior colleagues had always valued my advice and reached out to me for counsel.

There have been several significant milestones in this journey. One that comes to mind was my work with a German automotive company. I was asked to coach their local plant managers in China. I walked into this project only to realise that there was a huge cultural barrier – they were completely closed to the idea of coaching. As an outsider and a foreigner, it was not easy to penetrate the system. However, after a couple of sessions, I could feel the barrier shifting away, and later each of the managers reached out to me for individual sessions. Some of the feedback was overwhelming; they told me that this was one of the best and most candid conversations they had at work (and at play)!

What for you are the most crucial aspects of coaching a leader?

I always tell my clients that coaching is a subset of good leadership, not a separate discipline — you cannot hope to be a good leader without being a good coach.  Coaching requires many of the same skills critical to effective management, such as keen powers of observation, sensible judgement and an ability to take appropriate action. The hardest bit about coaching is not to learn something new – that’s actually easy. The hardest part is letting go of your old beliefs as you embark on this journey.

As you point out, many leaders, especially in the corporate space, are not always the best managers. What aspects of their work life can coaching help them with? 

Research shows that senior leaders inside companies spend less than 10 per cent of their time developing other leaders. So, I am often asked why organisations should allocate resources and ask their senior leaders to coach their employees.

As I started building the business case for the leader as coach, I sifted through a range of research and data and interviews with prominent business leaders. For starters, leaders should spend more time coaching others because that is how you leave behind a legacy and make a significant difference in your colleagues’ lives. In a moving speech at Harvard Business School, Sheryl Sandberg emphasised that “leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impacts last in your absence.”

I created the 4C+ Model as a simple framework for my clients to measure their coaching outcomes on four fundamental parameters – Capability, Consciousness, Confidence, and Clarity. Capability is about helping your employees innovate and create a ladder for their professional growth. Confidence is about empowering people to trust their abilities, qualities and judgement. Clarity is about seeing the bigger picture, and consciousness is about instilling self-awareness, and this is perhaps the most critical benefit of coaching.