Coaching Our Way Forward – PricewaterhouseCoopers
By Vicky Jayne, Editor, Management Magazine
How do you create consistency in communications and leadership skills across a professional services firm that has 100 partners and more than 1300 staff?
That was one of the challenges facing PricewaterhouseCoopers as the largest professional services firm in New Zealand worked its way through an ambitious and ongoing journey of cultural change designed to future-proof the firm’s market leadership.
To ensure sustainable success, PwC can’t afford to rest on either its size or its reputation for top-quality advice, it has to develop a distinctive culture expressed through both its internal and external interactions, explains PwC senior partner Bruce Baillie. “A key part of that is creating consistency in the way the firm deals with its people, as well as how it interacts with its clients and with the wider community.”
Like any major change, it has to start from within and be led from the top. An important part of this process was a leadership and coaching development programme which initially targeted PwC partners, says Baillie.
Building a consistent approach from the top down
“We were aware that the ability of our partners and senior managers to get the best out of their team varied according to the individual skills they had in that area. What we wanted was to get some consistency in terms of how people in the company are coached. “You have to start from the top because once you have consistency with partners in terms of their behaviour then you can start saying to managers ‘this is how you behave with staff’. It takes a while in an organisation this size for that change to filter through.”
Design and delivery
Stepshift was asked to help design and deliver the leadership and coaching programme specifically to meet the needs of PwC because they’d achieved some great results on an individual level within the firm, says Baillie. “They also have some models and templates we could identify with and use as part of this programme.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing. There was initial resistance from some senior partners who couldn’t see the value of the workshops – but by the third session many had been won over, says Baillie. “For some, the turnaround in attitude was significant and a lot of that was to do with the way the workshops were designed and facilitated. People started to see this made sense and they were getting something out of it. The feedback was pretty good.”
Leadership results
Overall, he believes the company succeeded in shifting its leadership coaching standards.
“We achieved our objectives by getting a level of consistency and a common language partners can use.” We have now rolled out this programme through managers and senior roles, says Baillie. But the benefits are not confined to internal relations. “It’s also about how you communicate with and coach your clients”, he adds. “Because in many ways our partners act as coaches to clients and the same principles that apply to staff can also be applied to clients. It can be quite handy at home as well, especially with teenage children!”
A key message of the coaching programme was its role in the firm’s overall success strategy. “To sustainably grow and develop our business,” says Baillie, “we need to attract, retain, grow and access the full potential of capable people and optimise our client relationships. Effective coaching is a proven methodology and skill set to achieve this. This capacity is the means to generate a great business short, medium and long term – this learning cannot be outsourced.”
He says proof of the programme’s effectiveness should show up in the next staff survey – but anecdotally people are already noticing the difference with internal relations. “For instance, the interaction that happens during staff appraisals is much more of a two-way discussion. Staff are really noticing things like that.”
As to longer term outcomes: “It’s been a necessary step in the journey we’re taking the organisation on in terms of the way it interacts with its people, with its clients and with the community,” says Baillie. “It’s an important component of the whole cultural development we’re doing throughout the organisation.”
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