Can psychological therapy provide the competencies executive coaching actually requires?
It’s not the first time that a psychiatrist has written about credentialing business coaching. Over the past twenty years there have been at least two articles in the Harvard Business Review by other psychiatrists pointing to the need for credentialing in psychology or psychiatry for the business coach. My hackles inevitably go up reading these articles. The current article, which appeared in Psyche Ideas, is a critique of business coaching by a Stanford psychiatrist, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. His conclusion is that coaching must be “defined and regulated so that mental health interventions can be offered by the experts trained to deliver them.” What adds fuel to the issue is the loosey-goosey goal of the Coaching Federation “to inspire the client to maximize potential.”
The conclusion that managers need a mental health intervention is a serious error—and an obvious power grab. Having worked extensively--one-on-one--with senior managers and executives for nearly 35 years, I’ve found that mental health has almost never been the issue. The psychiatrist and Coaching Federation not only misunderstand the needs of most executives, but they lack any awareness of the personal drives and psychological health of all but a very few managers.
My experience and education
Though neither a psychiatrist nor a registered psychologist, I hold a PhD in communications and modern rhetoric and an MDiv, along with the equivalent in post-doc course hours of a master’s in psychological foundations, including highly relevant subjects such as tests and measures, practice theory, abnormal, clinical, adult learning and informal supervision by a psychological mentor. In addition, my background includes extensive counseling as senior pastor for an eleven-year period in two university related churches, and eleven more years teaching and coaching preaching and communications for both Protestant and Catholic seminary students. Uniquely, I also coached maximum-security prisoners at Oak Park Heights, Minnesota. An additional 35 years were spent as executive coach of more than 500 senior managers and executives from more than a dozen industries in Fortune 100 and 500 corporations across the country, as well as in Latin America and Europe. Among my clients (with typically a year or more of personal coaching) were MBA grads of Harvard, Chicago, Northwestern, Tuck-Dartmouth, Wharton, and yes, Stanford—as well as others from major public universities. That also included major experiences coaching clients from the fields of law, medicine and architecture as well as Continental and Brit Europeans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Israelis—and members of the LGBT community. Most importantly, my background in rhetorical criticism, an extensive competency providing exceptional tools for both diagnosis and development of various forms and contexts of personality and relationships, brings profound insight to executive coaching. For example, with rhet crit you become a better “noticer” and can observe and then coach in ways simply not available to psychology—feeling the end of a person’s consonants and getting at meanings and subtexts reverberating in emotions. That competency lies outside the awareness of psychologists and those from other disciplines. The fact that major firms recruited me on a recurring basis over the years, points to their belief in the validity of my various approaches and insights. My point? The proliferation of differing tools in the social sciences and varied approaches for business coaching, the size--and what one executive called the “weird diversity” of my client base--meant that client need determined the necessary tools, a need that was never purely or even largely psychological.
What’s my beef?
Begin here: We now know that in any kind of problem solving the way you define a problem determines the way you resolve the problem. But still more important—and rarely mentioned—is that the tools you bring to the problem determine the way you define the problem. Until physician’s insurance rates skyrocketed as the cost for malpractice, it used to be said that if you take a medical problem to a surgeon, he’s going to recommend “cutting.” That’s why today’s surgeons need a clear rationale for Insurance to be willing to pay. Similarly, if you take an executive’s needs to a psychologist or psychiatrist, you can be damned certain they’re going to recommend a psychological resolution for the issue. And though psychologists regularly reject the notion of “medical model,” they are controlled unconsciously by its power. That’s true whether or not there are better and more efficient non-psychological ways to resolve the issue.
Dr. Aboujaoude is an example of this problem, writing that the common topics for leadership coaches are the “bread and butter of many a therapy session.” That’s simply not true. Obviously, the writer has little experience in business. If, for example, you take DSM-5, the standard set of diagnostic criteria for the American Psychiatric Association, nothing, absolutely nothing in all those psychiatric categories fits typical business requests for help, nor are executive needs satisfied by “bread and butter” therapy. In the psychiatrist’s attempt to create a semantic world bounded on all sides by psychology, he got caught up in his psychological shorts.
Common development issues
The common developmental topics for executive coaches are determined not only by the basic performance needs requested by a client—even when off-base and wrong, but also by the organizational strategy and the cultural emphases of a given time period. For example, the 1980s were strongly oriented to basic management vs. leadership competencies, team skills and, I realized early on, the often, profound needs of significantly introverted IT people with a deficit of interpersonal competencies. The 1990s were oriented to working with flattening hierarchies, more interactional conversation, ordinary exec needs (like time-management or small-talk) and internal client-based, cross-cultural teamwork. The early 2000s, to more cross-disciplinary communication, complex teamwork, more technology management, decision process, business empathy, and—as the research and my experience reveal--ever more profound interpersonal deficits.
That’s just a smattering of the kinds of issues business coaches must deal with. Furthermore, business often follows “Great-Leader” perceptions more than actual need. If a major firm’s leaders have Jack Welch in for guidance and speaking, then other major firms do the same. Or if it’s Tom Peters, then…same. Or today, it’s Magic Johnson, Sallie Krawcheck or Adam Grant, then…same. It’s a rare corporate vice-president who understands that these people work out of their own past contexts and these contexts may not fit the needs of execs and the corporations hiring them. I often thought that Welch’s insights in the ‘90s were more bothersome than helpful. His recommendations rarely fit a given manager’s needs. (Welch finally got around to admitting that in print—shortly before his demise.) But these “Great Leader” perceptions of excellence drive perceived needs and impact coaching. That, of course, means that a successful coach has to work with irrelevant perceptions, inadequate diagnoses and actual needs—requiring a lot of interpersonal and management smarts and business savvy, as well as multiple competencies to be able to support and successfully coach a client. On top of all this, successful coaches will do testing and extensive client assessments involving interactions with colleagues that include the cross disciplinary, subordinates, bosses, internal and occasionally external clients—all requiring terrific interpersonal smarts.
Indeed, the primary needs for executive development are not mental health, but practical competencies. Not psychological therapy, but usually interpersonal development—in all its shapes, forms and contexts—including the dyadic, team, strategic and intercultural. If you listen closely, you’ll notice that managers and execs inevitably frame their issues in interpersonal terms. Even when it’s family, as in “my wife is going to divorce me if I don’t start working fewer hours.” Of course, any psychologist could easily make that a psych issue, but it was actually the lack of a workable strategy for the executive to manage the hundreds of subordinates wanting to kiss up to him. And that conclusion is damned paradigmatic in business coaching—not a problem of mental health needs or inspiration. That’s not to say that mental health or motivational needs never come up, but they occupy only very minimal coaching needs of talented, capable executives. In sum, it’s rare for the psychologist—much less the psychiatrist—to have the necessary competencies for business coaching.
Though psychologists will say they have the competencies to deal with team relations, etc., their developmental skill conversations are inevitably at the abstract level, making coaching useless. They have no sense of the hierarchy of skills from simple to complex, nor the ability to break the most simple skill into coachable, learnable, practical bits, for making learning possible. No sense of linguistic forms, little know-how of framing, or the ability to read subtexts and provide political guidance. Little sense of the role and uses of power in decision-making processes. And very little knowledge of interpersonal negotiating, selling ideas, conflict management and how to read small talk, competencies most managers need almost every day. And if a consultant can’t identify these issues, it’s impossible to make an accurate practical recommendation to a training expert because of that deficiency.
Psych bias
A still more deep-seated problem with the psychological conclusion is that both psychiatry and psychology frame independence and autonomy as the hallmarks of the mature leader, a profound misunderstanding of business need. With the rarest of exceptions, psychology celebrates Western culture’s orientation to autonomy, self-interest, competition and strength in isolation. Furthermore, the pervasive, hidden impact of Freudian theory on nearly all psych models, is intensely intrapersonal—not interpersonal. Its extreme focus on the individual reinforces the worst behaviors in American business and society, and denies the very nature of being human. This nearly wholesale emphasis of psychology on the self is rooted in Baconian models of science, emphasizing the separateness of objects, a reality we now understand does not jive with the actual human state. Indeed, when autonomy and “standing on your own two feet” are emphasized, you’re going against your own innate nature and sociobiology. Evolutionary research, especially since the turn of this century, has found—beyond the question of a doubt—that over two million years, the organization of the unconscious brain came first. And the underlying, innate character of the unconscious brain is fundamentally relational, not autonomous. Our primary, deepest motivations are toward survival and physical safety, only made possible by the third motivation—collaboration. Psychological coaching against the relational motivation and actual business need is not only damaging to the individual and business, but also stupid.
For example, quite a few years ago I was asked to work with a top corporate lawyer, who, according to the firm’s HR, was creating a lot of conflict with his colleagues and having difficulty collaborating. In my first appointment with him, he informed me that he was “paranoid” and had been working with a psychiatrist for nearly two years. An intriguing bit of openness. As part of that first interview, I asked whether he was comfortable with talking about his family relations. He smiled and described loving, empathic, caring relationships. But my model is also built on interviews with approximately a dozen colleagues of a client--at all levels—and cross-disciplinary. So, one of my objectives for those interviews was to figure out what his business hostility was all about. Typically, I learned, he got angry when his work was questioned by his colleagues. But I also knew that psychiatrists inevitably focus on what’s wrong, rather than what’s right. They work out of a medical model that says that disorders have an organic or physical cause. They build boundaries around the client for safety, ignoring the person’s innate nature. So, into our third conversation, I flipped the focus and the underlying reality structure and asked “what’s right or helpful about being a paranoid corporate lawyer?” Silence. Then, “Nothing.” I slowly responded, “Really?” After a long silence, he responded that he was “exceptionally thorough.” That made perfect sense to me. Forty-five minutes later we decided that if I was a business exec, working in a highly competitive market, I’d sure as hell prefer an exceptionally thorough, slightly paranoid lawyer over a fully healthy lawyer--any day. A paranoid lawyer would make certain “there were no possible loopholes in his contract work.” Of course, he’d never thought about that and his psychiatrist lacked both the business tools—and the mindset--to even consider that possibility. A complete mental revision, rejecting the medical model and the boundaries that were creating much of the hostility, and then sending his interpersonal insecurities out the window. A month later, I checked into the law firm, but stopped by HR first. The immediate question was “how did you do that?” I commented that I didn’t “share proprietary tools,” to HR laughter. I reported in to my client about the HR satisfaction, smirked, and then asked him what he thought his anger was all about. After a bit of silence, he responded that maybe it was the psychiatric definition of the problem—and asked whether I agreed. I admitted I was clueless, but didn’t really give a damn, as long as he was handling his anger. Oh yeah, I got a full-year check for less than three months work. A few years later he did some legal work for me—at half price—and was still doing well—with little collaborative difficulty. He probably is still slightly paranoid. So, WTF?
Diagnose or coach?
Long before I understood how psychology works on assumptions contrasting significantly with business need, I found my clients requiring desperate, collaborative talking abilities to succeed in business and in life. A certain kind of talk—conversation—really isn’t cheap; it is consequential and far-reaching. The research of MIT’s Sherry Turkle confirms the obvious: we have sacrificed conversation for mere digital technology, making the demands for interactional talk competencies even more necessary and obvious. Drawing on years of interviews in homes, class-rooms, and the workplace, she finds the need for conversational talk competencies ever more urgent. But psychiatrists and psychologists focus on diagnosis. Turkle, a licensed clinical psychologist, is brilliant at diagnosis, but has practically nothing to say of how to resolve our conversational problem. She provides approximately 20 out of 350 pages to recommend that we turn off our digital devices and put ourselves in situations where we have to talk. But “having to talk” does very little for developing the conversational and interactional competencies that are riddled with complexity and often required in business today. Conversation is not natural, but a learned competency—a fact of which Turkle seems completely unaware. It's always the over-credentialed, high-IQ people who fail to get this. A conclusion? You can’t even do a half-assed coaching job if you can’t help resolve the client’s needs for profound conversational competencies.
Furthermore, those who do not operate on the basis of competent interactional talk are eventually excluded from teams and organizations. Bring up Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey or even Andrew Grove if you will. But none of those guys could have succeeded without the collaborative ability to gain insights, competencies, expertise and commitment from others. The fundamental reason Zuckerberg brought in Sandberg was that she had the background to mentor him. And where did she get that ability? From her mentor and sponsor, Larry Summers. The Press and a plethora of business books still get it wrong. Of course, it’s rare for a successful senior executive to admit to the interactional, network background of their success. They’d rather brag about their personal talent. That just goes with the executive territory.
Failure rates
Let’s get real: it’s also important to recognize that psychologists and psychiatrists have a very high failure rate. Over the years, plenty “credentialed” psychologists admitted to me that mental health diagnoses are very difficult to assess, initiate and carry through. So, it was a common expectation that their success rate was no more than 50%. Research by Amanda Kepler at St. Thomas University found the success rate of pre-marriage counseling in the neighborhood of 20-25%. Yale’s Rounsaville and Kleber found a 45% success rate in counseling opiate addicts.
But go on--traditional marriage counseling supposedly has a success rate of 70 to 80 percent. But research from a decade ago indicated that 38 percent of couples who receive marriage therapy got divorced within four years of completing therapy. Admittedly, that study was done with therapists who were new to the practice and not familiar with evidence-based theory. Still, that calls the values of credentialing into question.
There is some solid medical research—in certain disciplines—revealing a success rate of 60%. But physicians have tests, medications, internal examinations that are not available to the business coach. (You can’t actually get inside a client’s head or gut.) In a conversation with my internist, an MD, PhD at the University of Minnesota medical school, his response was telling. I asked whether he happened to know the failure rate in his field. He did not. It was, I said, in the neighborhood of 40%. He smiled, and responded, “I would have thought it was higher than that.”
Trustworthy research in outcome performance for executive coaching is very difficult to gain. Though there are a few studies, they lack significant rigor. The basic reason for research failure is political. If a manager or an exec is able to get the funding for coaching from his organization, you can be damned certain that he—and his colleagues will report to the boss that the coaching was beneficial and worthwhile. No subordinate is comfortable telling his boss that the money was wasted. That would make it very difficult to get financial support in the future. Thus far, I’ve seen no solid research indicating that coaching is of high benefit other than self-reported information.
Credentialing?
So why the focus on credentialing? Today’s physician-credentialing has become increasingly complex, especially with the advent of the information age. Exams and proof of training still play an important role. The stated purpose, of course, is to validate the professional’s expertise, meet legal requirements for insurance satisfaction, and protect the client and patient. But the unstated purpose is to limit personnel competition and maintain high financial return for the physician and psychologist. That’s obvious in the limits placed upon medical school graduation numbers. And even more obvious in the numbers each discipline places upon residencies.
I’m not impugning physicians, psychiatrists or psychologists for their orientation to income. It was one of the reasons I left the university to go into consulting. However, it should be obvious that remuneration is inevitably a major driver of credentialing for business coaches. Even middle-class vocations like the credentialing of a residential electrician—and factory union membership are also financial power grabs. Business consulting fees are not controlled by insurance companies, unlike general counseling and psychiatry. And business coaching is a classic case of what the market will bear. Of course, insurance companies are putting the squeeze on psychologists, making their traditional counseling business difficult and limiting income. In contrast, for some coaches, the business market will bear a lot more than insurance will pay. And the best business coaches make well into six figures—a few close to a million bucks a year.
Last I heard, the average income of a business consultant today is approximately $75,000—and plenty master’s degree counselors and life coaches are happy to make that. I’ll bet that, on average, the "life coach" to whom the “Psyche” article refers, working in traditional counseling, brings in less than that. So why not limit business coaching to credentialed psychiatrists and psychologists? And, build walls around that business so that all fees will go up based on simple supply and demand? It makes a lot of sense for psychologists if they can pull it off. But not much sense for dealing with an executives’ business needs.
Finally, business coaching is a two-way street. Both the client and the firm have responsibility for selecting coaches with valid backgrounds. Aboujaoude’s anecdote regarding the weak life coach is an unbelievable outlier. Sounds to me like a dumb jerk in a dumb organization hiring another dumb jerk--which happens in any profession, even the well-credentialed medical professions. The good news is that nearly all major organizations today have requirements (often unstated) for the hiring of business coaches. With the huge amount of consultant coaching going on today, most corporate HR work off their records of the better, viable coaches. Overwhelmed by the plethora of psychologists, if any coach is not on the approved list of a firm, HR is liable to require a relevant PhD and references as part of their coach assessment. Business coach reputations are highly networked among differing organizations. “Who have you worked for?” is normal for a coaching job. The response is liable to be followed up if there’s the slightest question about the references. Business execs are no slouch at interviewing a consulting coach. It may sound innocent, like “tell me a couple stories about your coaching experience.” But that can be highly revealing information to a smart exec.
The art form
Executive coaching is an art form. Though it requires an immense amount of knowledge and a great deal of hard work, it also requires a high degree of imagination and creativity in every aspect of the business. You’re always on stage. Not just for clients, but people from all disciplines, levels and cultures are watching. What you both say and do will always be weighed. And when your performance is really on, and your client is moving and growing, there’s nothing more exciting and satisfying. It’s why so often I walked out of my client’s office with a big smile on my face, sometimes a great deal of laughter.
Sure, I’m rejecting credentialing, but I’m arguing more than that: counseling or psychiatric therapy simply does not fit the needs of business coaching. No question, the business coach will meet what could look like a psychological problem, but usually it’s capable of more efficient resolution than psychology can bring. By the time a person gets to director level, much less vice-president or the holder of a C-suite, the huge majority of needy persons have been factored out. In fact, with over 500 high-powered clients, less than 1% of them should have been given therapy rather than coaching. The business question then becomes whether that psychological need is a viable strategic issue requiring corporate support. Sure, there are a few wackos like Donald J. Trump, Travis Kalanick or Les Moonves leading organizations. But they’re not going to ask for help anyway. And no street-smart psychologist would ever want to coach them. But for the typical hot-shot manager or exec needing to deal with some business issues or update, it should be obvious that psych credentialing is an albatross, not a consulting edge. Business is going to need something different and a lot more than a credentialed psychologist has to offer.