“WOULD you spend several million pounds on a Manchester United footballer and then not bother to give him a coach?” said Jez Cartwright, an executive coach. “Of course not – so why pay a chief executive £350,000 a year and then do nothing to protect your investment? It makes no sense.”

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than three-quarters of organisations now invest in coaching, including performance and personal coaching, for their employees.

At Lloyds TSB, the corporate-banking division in Scotland was one of the first of the bank’s departments to embrace performance coaching. “Many people wrongly assume coaching is about addressing underperformance,” said Manus Fullerton at Lloyds TSB Scotland. “In fact it is of greatest benefit when coaching your best performers. All the top sportsmen and women have coaches to help them improve.

“We are taking the same approach in our business, not just coaching individuals, but training our teams to coach one another. We have witnessed growth in business levels, staff engagement and a real appetite for further coaching.”

Despite the touchy-feely image, Cartwright, a former sports coach and psychologist, agrees that coaching is not for failures – quite the reverse. “Tiger Woods has five different coaches and nobody would say he is a failure,” he said. “But we have this macho British idea that chief executives ought to be able to just get on and do the job. In most businesses, once you reach partnership level your training and development stops.”

With a few more executive coaches there would, he said, “be fewer people quitting, getting the sack or jumping out of windows. It’s lonely at the top – who else can these people talk to?” Cartwright points out that senior executives can’t talk to their peers – because they will be after their job – they can’t talk to their board because that would be seen as a sign of weakness and they certainly can’t confide in their subordinates.

But how can coaches like Cartwright help them to navigate their way through the shark-in-vested corporate waters?

“I’m not here to help them work out how to trade currencies, for example. If they don’t know, they can find someone who can. At this level success is all about relationships and knowing why you do the things and make the decisions you do.”

It may have started in America, but in the past five years coaching has become established in the British business world – and it doesn’t come cheap. Cartwright’s programme of eight one-and-a-half-hour sessions will set you back £6,000. Yet coaches are busily replacing the Miss Moneypennys of office life as the one person the boss can confide in.

Andy Winterburgh, managing director of Witan Jardine, a recruitment consultancy with a turnover of £25m a year, admits he was wary about letting a coach into his office, but had heard good things about Cartwright and, besides, it was his boss’s idea.

“I was both interested and wary,” said Winterburgh. “I’m quite open about training and personal development, but I found some of it quite difficult and I was quite suspicious of why he was asking all these questions about my childhood and how that related to the work I was doing.”

There’s nothing wishy-washy in Cartwright’s approach, which can be simplified as “first know thyself”. It involves probing into his client’s past – the theory being that until you know what makes you tick you will have little understanding of why you behave the way you do and therefore how to change your own and others’ behaviour.

“It was quite hard-hitting,” said Winterburgh, explaining that Cartwright had unearthed a particularly telling childhood memory that had influenced not only his own self-image, but the way he had interacted with people ever since.

“When I was a child I was unfairly accused of plagiarising some work,” said Winterburgh. Not only did that event have a detrimental effect on his academic ambitions – “I thought what’s the point of trying to do well if you get accused of plagiarism” – but it also made him wary of sticking his head above the parapet.

“In meetings I would portray myself as being less intelligent than others in the room.” An unforeseen consequence of this was that he came to believe it and so could never understand why other people were not grasping what he was saying.

“If I could understand it, then it must be simple,” he reasoned. The result? His own misplaced insecurity led him to come across as an impatient and unsympathetic boss – quite the reverse of his own instincts. He also tended to hide himself away in his office in the belief that nobody wanted to talk to the managing director.

This is quite common, said Cartwright: “Lots of bosses go on about how they have an open-door policy but nobody ever walks through the door because they know they are going to get their head bitten off.”

Winterburgh said: “I’m much better at listening now – I ask questions first and really try to get an idea of what people are saying before I give an answer.”

Like many others he tended to use experience instead of insight. “If you have been managing people for a long time you get used to expecting the same kind of situations rolling round again, and if you are not careful you begin to treat them all as variations of a theme and that isn’t the most effective way to deal with them because you are not really understanding them.”

So having enjoyed the benefits of a coach, has Winterburgh been converted? “I do carry a card in my wallet with a thing or two to remember that I’m not going to share with you,” he said, but he would rather let the business speak for itself.

“We’ve just sold Witan Jardine to Australia’s Ambition Group, which means we can now offer people work across three continents. Last year we were one of The Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For. This year we were awarded the Financial News Award for Excellence. And for the last three years our profits have gone up 30% a year.

“After Jez has been coaching people in the company for three months – and these are already high performers – their performance has increased in some cases by 50%.”

How much of that is down to Cartwright? “Oh, all of it – I’m completely talentless,” said Winterburgh, proving that his natural self-deprecation hasn’t been altogether coached out of him.

The Handbook for Exceptional People, by Jez Cartwright, is published by Rodale

TYPES OF COACHING

THIS guide has been compiled by Gladeana McMahon, executive coach and vice-president of the Association for Coaching, who believes that coaching can be divided into three main areas.

EXECUTIVE COACHING

Mostly organised by, and paid for, by the employer and divided into three general areas.

- Performance-recovery coaching. This is designed to bring someone up to an expected level – for example, after a promotion – or to bring someone back up to expectations where performance has declined.

- Coaching for excellence. This is aimed at people who are already high performers. The aim is to make what’s good even better.

- Team coaching. This involves working with groups rather than individuals – for example, working with a department or a board of directors to build better team relationships, increase performance, or improve communications.

LIFE COACHING

This can also involve career development, but people are more likely to organise and pay for it themselves. It can deal with any aspect of life, such as parenting or improving your social life.

SPECIALITY COACHING

This is sometimes paid for by an employer but it targets a particular subject – for example, stress or confidence – and the organisation looks for a particular coach to deal with it.

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