From MentorCoach News: “Marion Gindes cuts through some of the confusion surrounding the similarities and differences between coaching and consulting.”

Business Consulting and Coaching: Birds of a Feather?
Marion Gindes, PhD
MentorCoach News, September 2005

During the last decade or so, coaching has received a good deal of attention, both in the business domain and personal domains. People sometimes confuse coaching with therapy or assume that coaching and consulting are the same. In this article, I will focus on consulting in the context of the business environment. For clarification, I will also compare and contrast consulting and coaching.

For me, business consultants generate people solutions for those people problems that result in business problems (Gindes, 1999). I leave consulting about how to fix computers or make a better widget to others.

A review the literature for this article highlights that approaches to consulting and coaching vary. Several
psychological theories, including systems, rational-emotive, psychoanalytic, and behavioral theory, have influenced approaches to coaching and consulting. However, no one definition of coaching or consulting is universally accepted.

Consulting, as a term, is broader than coaching. Consultants, for many years have used coaching, prior to the recent upsurge in the popularity of coaching as we now know it. Most consultants view coaching as one of several techniques or processes that can be of tremendous value in the course of a consultation engagement.

So, what is consulting? In "Flawless Consulting", Peter Block says that a consultant is someone who is "in a position to have some influence over an individual, a group, or an organization, but who has no direct power to make changes or implement programs". Although a consultant can help clients identify problems and develop solutions, it is the client who must put the solutions into action. For consultants, the client may be an individual, group/team, department, or an entire organization.

Paraphrasing Block's definition of a consultant, a coach is someone in a position to have some influence generally over an individual, but who has no direct power to make changes or initiate action. Both consultants and coaches are outside of the system they try to improve.

Coaching is usually conducted on a one-on-one basis. The coaching client may be specifically sent by the organization, may choose to be coached on his or her own, or may be part of a more general coaching program instituted by a company. The impetus for coaching may be to improve leadership skills, to help a person get back on track after derailing, or to prepare a high-potential person for the next step.
Frequently, when individuals seek work-related coaching, they may feel at an impasse, may have problems dealing with specific issues at work, may want to improve communication, leadership, or other abilities, or may want to explore other career options. Regardless of the circumstances leading to the coaching, it is a personalized and experiential relationship that depends on mutual trust.

Once, a female executive came to me because she felt she was not moving up and not getting the best assignments. Employed in a predominantly-male field, she had a conflict with her boss and stated that men didn't listen to her at meetings. She felt intimidated by men, even those junior to her. A number of questions immediately emerged:

This article was published September 2005, as the feature article in MENTORCOACH NEWS, a newsletter for coaches.

1. Does she have personal issues that are contributing to her difficulties with men at work?

2. How much is the corporate culture (unfriendly to women) contributing to the way the men act?

3. What can she do to get past this problem so that it no longer interferes with her work.

Because she came to me on her own, collecting data about the company or getting information from other people in her department was not sought. Many issues were explored in the coaching - had she ever been in this situation before, had she resolved it, and, if so, how? Given that she did not want to leave this particularly lucrative job, a major focus of the coaching involved developing strategies to deal with behavior that disturbed her.

Consulting and coaching share many characteristics. The core of both coaching and consulting rests in the relationship that develops with the client, whether the client is an individual, the CEO, the senior vice-president or a team. Block advocates using yourself as an instrument and paying attention to your
reactions to the client. Neither consultants nor coaches give their clients the answers. They do not tell them what to do. They make suggestions, facilitate, guide, and help the client to brainstorm and problem-solve. Both consulting and coaching can be thought of as fixing a problem or improving a good thing. The desired outcome is positive change. For the consultant, the improvement may be seen at the individual, group, or organizational level, or at all three levels. For both consultants and coaches, one goal is to help the client develop the skills and knowledge that will enable him to proceed and ultimately succeed without the help of the coach or consultant. Consulting is more likely to operate within a larger organizational unit than the individual coaching client, and generally uses multiple intervention methods, including coaching.

What do consultants actually do? Simply put, consultants work to bring about change within an organization. Many consultants are experts in assessment of people-potential. They may conduct screening for employment or promotion. They may design and run management development programs. Other
consultants focus on the organizational level. They identify and assess organizational problems and design solutions or interventions that will lead to solutions.

Every consulting project involves the following steps:
1. Gather data;
2. Assess the data;
3. Integrate and interpret the data;
4. Design appropriate interventions based on the assessment and interpretation.

The information may be gathered through use of a survey, observation, interviews, or even methods that can be scored, such as the Myers-Briggs. In some instances, statistical analysis is applied to the data.

The intervention techniques used to accomplish positive change may include team building, running retreats, giving workshops, or coaching individuals. Within the same consulting engagement, a consultant may use a variety of intervention techniques, when appropriate. In addition, consultants sometimes fill different roles within the same company.
For example, I was once asked to present a workshop for HR people on communication skills. Within five minutes, I realized that no one wanted to learn about communication skills. The headquarters and President of this company, a subsidiary of a large energy company, was moving to a new location, about two hours away. The participants' concern about what would happen at their location was overwhelming -they could not focus on the topic of communication. They wanted to talk about what was happening, what they could do about it, and how they could cope with the outcome.

Later that day, I met with the President of the company to give him feedback. Essentially, that became a new consultation as we worked on ways to assure the employees at the current location that they would not be lost in the shift. In one day, I went from a workshop presenter to group coach to executive coach.

Given article space constraints, I have omitted much about business consulting and coaching. I hope I have communicated the following message, at a minimum: Both consultants and coaches can make a difference in the quality of life at work, and by extension, away from work.

For references and further reading, I suggest:

Block, P. (1999 - Second Edition). Flawless Consulting.

Gindes, M. (2000, Fall) "Five Steps to Becoming a First-Rate Business Consultant". The Independent Practitioner, 20, 271-275

Gindes, M. (1999, Summer) "Consulting to Business on Workplace Behavior: Discrimination, Harassment, and Conflict". Guide published by the Independent Practice Division of the American Psychological Association.

Kilburg, R. (2000). Executive Coaching: Developing Managerial Wisdom in a World of Chaos.

Levinson, H. (2002). Organizational Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Consulting.

Lowman, R. L. (Ed.) (2002). Handbook of Organizational Consulting Psychology: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory, Skills, and Techniques

Weiss, A. (1998) Million Dollar Consulting: The Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice.

This article was reprinted from MENTORCOACH NEWS , September, 2005 Vol. 6/9.

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Marion Gindes, PhD is a business consultant, coach, and forensic psychologist. She works with individuals, teams, and senior executives within organizations, specializing in workplace-related issues, including executive coaching, discrimination, gender issues, sexual harassment, conflict resolution, team building, stress, diversity, and career advancement strategies. Marion also works with professionals who want to become business consultants. She can be reached at: mgindes@gindesconsulting.com or telephone: 914-833-1944 or fax: 914-833-1602. Her web site is: www.gindesconsulting.com

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