Here's something I wrote a number of years ago. The context was the professional services sector but much of it is applicable elsewhere too:
Professional Services: Coaching
Coaching plays an important role in the professional development of junior associates of professional services firms.
Firms that provide high quality coaching are likely to gain a competitive advantage in terms of lower levels of regretted employee turnover.
Retention
To retain professionals firms need to provide sufficent opportunities for them to develop the skills required to further their career at an appropriate rate.
High quality coaching facilitates the acquistion of skills and ultimately, professional development and career progression.
Junior associates expect to receive high quality coaching from partners and other senior professionals.
Firms that do not provide high quality coaching run the risk of losing ambitious associates to rival companies.
Skill Building
Coaching plays a significant role in assisting junior associates to develop particular skills by enabling associates to learn more from work assignments.
A common complaint from junior professionals concerns the lack of genuine interest from partners in helping them to improve, rather than simply appraising their performance.
Many young professionals do not appear to be getting sufficient specific, helpful advice from the partners they work for.
Professional development is crucial to career progression, as a result juniors are very conscious of the extent to which they are developing new skills.
Responsibility
To develop their careers junior associates need to be given appropriate, additional levels of responsibility.
The decision whether to delegate responsibility lies with the partner leading the client assignment.
Delegation
Partners and senior professionals who are highly skilled at coaching tend to be more willing to delegate responsibility to junior employees, trusting in their own ability to coach the inexperienced employee through any difficult moments.
Conversely, partners that lack adequate coaching skills will tend to retain more of the responsibility for themselves seeing only the potential downside of letting juniors do much of the work.
Junior employees are largely reliant upon partners being prepared to delegate responsibility. Where under-delegation is prevalent, junior employees have a tendency to seek to pursue their careers elsewhere, with costly implications for the firm concerned.
Expectations
Individuals that have experienced high quality coaching from supervisors at their previous firm are likely to have high expectations of the level of coaching they will receive from their new employer.
Similarly, younger employees such as recent graduates tend to expect informal coaching to be a day to day occurrance.
Rewards and Incentives
Firms that do not track the standard of coaching being provided, run the risk of some partners regarding coaching juniors to be of secondary importance.
Ensuring coaching is one of the elements discussed during the annual partner performance review, should encourage partners to take the coaching of junior associates more seriously.
Firms should check their partner compensation system to see whether the quality of coaching delivered by each partner is amongst the criteria on which their reward is based.
If not, firms should consider whether high quality coaching is likely to occur throughout the firm without such an incentive being in place, especially if the current system effectively penalises those partners that invest considerable time in coaching juniors.
Upward Feedback
Making use of routine upward feedback on the standard of coaching provided by the partner concerned on each client assignment, through the use of questionnaires to be completed by junior associates, is a sensible approach to adopt.
These can then be used in the partner's annual performance review.
Coaching Skills
Where a partner's coaching skills are suspected to be deficient, the firm needs to take appropriate action to limit the damage caused.
In some cases coaching skills can be learnt, or at least improved so that they become adequate. However, it is unrealistic to think that a day or two of training will make much difference.
Where possible, the firm should examine whether alternative options exist that would allow individuals to focus on their strengths rather than areas of weakness.
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