Follow the Leader

In the past few years dozens of companies have sprung up, promising to release the hidden leader within us all and propel us to the top. The £722 million boom in so-called life coaching has, perhaps inevitably, led to accusations that companies without any experience at all are jumping on to the band wagon.
‘Coaching has become so fashionable that there are courses springing up all over the place and many are led by people who have failed to be leaders,' said Julia Middleton, the founder of coaching company Common Purpose. ‘These charlatans are undermining the industry. An individual looking for advice should choose their coach carefully and find out whether the trainer has been a success themselves. After all, why take advice from someone who has no experience of what you are asking?'
It is a point echoed by On Leadership founder Allan Leighton, who says that while coaching can be a vital management tool, for everyone to benefit it has to be well thought out. That means being realistic and task based. He said; ‘There are too many courses which say, ‘go climb Everest to find out if you are a good leader'. What does that show you? That is nothing to do with leadership. ‘I prefer the ‘sheep dip' approach where everyone learns practical skills at the same time. ‘Pick a theme, such as Managing Meetings and put the entire management of one organisation through it in one year. The whole development of that business is then based on how the team runs meetings and with everyone at the same level at the same time it makes it easy to judge how they all perform. There is a practical advantage for both the business and the team.'
Much of the growth in the leadership coaching industry has been fuelled by the belief that there is a pressing need for good leaders at all levels in a modern business.
According to life coaching expert, David Pardey the rise in demand for training is not because everyone has designs on being named the next chief executive of BP. Quite simply, people at all levels are taking on more responsibilities.
‘There has been a major shift towards distributed leadership,' said Pardey, a policy and research manager at ILM. ‘There is a need for much more autonomy among groups and individuals within the entire framework of a company.
‘It means that people, even at the bottom of a company, have to take more responsibility and make things happen.‘The traditional role of the leader is to make things happen.'
Of course, even the strongest advocate of leadership coaching, will admit that there are some employees who simply are not leadership material. They go to the workplace to do their jobs, look forward to their pay cheque and that is as far as their aspirations go.
Even then though, insist the experts, there is a hidden leader in everyone and companies who overlook that miss out on some vital talent.
‘Don't dismiss people entirely because they say they have no interest in leadership,' said Common Purpose's Julia Middleton. ‘Look below the surface and you will see that outside of work, these same people have done the most incredible things from single-handedly saving a scout group, to raising hundreds for a charity.
‘Companies which fail to recognise this have missed out on years of effective leadership experience.'