Coaching Competencies for Managers

Our expert Dr Anthony Grant suggests that Managers need to develop the
following attributes to become effective coaches at work: [The model below has
been developed by David Clutterbuck.]

The 10 core coaching competencies are:

• Self-awareness, including understanding of self and interest in self-knowledge)

• Behavioral awareness, including understanding others
• Communication and listening skills
• Conceptualising and intellectual ability
• Business and professional savvy, business knowledge; ethics, integrity
• Sense of proportion and humour
• Interest in developing others and a desire to coach
• Committed to own learning
• Goal setting skills, and relationship management, empathy, personal boundary
management

More recent research (Dec. 2002) reported at the Consortium of Emotional

Intelligence shows these attributes as vital for counselors to be successful and
can be used to separate effectiveness in this skills domain:

The critically important competencies were:

• Emotional Self-Awareness from the Self-Awareness Cluster of EI

competencies; and
• Empathy from the Social Awareness Cluster of EI competencies.

The researcher (Richard E. Boyatzis, Ph.D) reported that both of these were
significant at the skill level. This implied that training or developing these
competencies might be more feasible than if they were at the trait or motive
level of personality.

He found that regardless of the organizational climate of the various facilities in

which they worked, type of training received to prepare for their role, and the age
demographics of their clients, these characteristics, these competencies explained
why some counselors were more effective than others.

In short…he states: “To be effective as a counselor, and by extension an executive

coach, a person must be sensitive to others. To be sensitive to others, he/she must be
sensitive to themselves.”
 Core Coaching Competencies

The following chart highlights some of the key elements to successfully coaching
employees for sustainable behavior change:

While the following diagram describes the various stages of change that need to

“Relapse”
be
Permanent Slipping back
into old
understood
Exit behaviours
and managed:
New behaviours Pre-
become part of Contemplation
personality

STAGES of
Maintenance CHANGE Contemplation
Sustaining change Thinking about change
Feeling ambivalent

Action Preparation
Deciding and beginning Preparing to change
change
6 Top Leadership EQ Skills:
An analysis of more than 300 top-level executives from 15 global companies showed that six
emotional competencies distinguished stars from the average: Influence, Team Leadership,
Organizational Awareness, Self-Confidence, Achievement Drive and Leadership.
(Spencer, L. M., Jr., 1997).

EQ Examples at Work:
• At L’Oreal, sales agents selected on the basis of certain emotional competencies
significantly outsold salespeople selected using the company’s old selection procedure.
On an annual basis, salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competence sold
$91,370 more than other salespeople did, for a net revenue increase of $2,558,360.
Salespeople selected on the basis of emotional competence also had 63% less turn-over
during the first year than those selected in the typical way (Spencer & Spencer, 1993;
Spencer, McClelland, & Kelner, 1997).

• Optimism is another emotional competence that leads to increased productivity. New

salesmen at Met Life who scored high on a test of “learned optimism” sold 37 percent
more life insurance in their first two years than pessimists (Seligman, 1990).

• Research by the Centre for Creative Leadership has found that the primary causes of
derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary
ones are difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor
interpersonal relations.

• One of the foundations of emotional competence -- accurate self-assessment -- was

associated with superior performance among several hundred managers from 12 different
organizations (Boyatzis, 1982).

Prepared for the

Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations
by Cary Cherniss, Ph.D.
Rutgers University