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The world of work

The joy of coaching

Julia Hobsbawm

Thursday, 24th May 2007

Wimp or not, I’m happy to declare that I regularly consult a coach. I consider it both money and time well spent. Ginger Cockerham is one of America’s top practitioners, running programmes at Columbia University as well as taking on private entrepreneur clients like me. In the jargon which probably has some people reaching for the smelling salts — just as they did when ‘Media Studies’ first entered the university lexicon — she is a fully fledged ‘Master Coach’.

When I admit I have a coach I tend to be grilled mercilessly over lunch for free nuggets of time-saving or strategy-enhancing initiatives; but when I say, ‘Try it, it’s great!’, I feel like the character in Dr Seuss’s children’s story Green Eggs and Ham, who has to cajole a reticent creature to try the eponymous green eggs and ham — until the famous Seussian sceptic declares, amazed, ‘I do like it! I do!!’

This may be why the world is now awash with business titles on leadership, coaching and mentoring. They have catchy titles such as The Naked Coach: Business Coaching Made Simple, just published by David Taylor to follow The Naked Leader. I’m an admirer of the American leadership guru Jim Collins, who is probably best known in Britain because he followed his bestseller Built to Last with Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don’t. (Incidentally, Built to Last was pinched as a title by David Cameron’s Conservatives for one of their early positioning papers.)

One of the values of a good coach is that in addition to echoing the best business sentiments found in books, they top up generic insight with tailored guidance. I estimate that an hour’s coaching frees up three or four hours to think or do things with more focus. It also helps me to think about the long-term issues despite being mired in the daily grind. It may be anal and it may be banal but anything that helps me tackle being stuck at the office hours after I want to go home, or drowning in too many ‘to-do lists’, both feels productive and is.

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