Barbara Otto, a Chicago charity executive, was dropping her 2-year-old daughter off at day care when she got back into her
car, put her head down on the steering wheel, and thought, “I’m crashing and burning.”
She says that as the mother of a young child, she had come to realize that she could not keep working the way she had over the previous decade as the chief executive of Health and Disability Advocates, a fast-growing Chicago charity. To hold onto her job and her sanity, Ms. Otto knew she had to change her work habits, but she didn’t know how.
In search of answers, Ms. Otto called Marcia Lipetz, president of the Executive Service Corps of Chicago, which offers low-cost consulting and other services to local charities. Ms. Lipetz suggested an executive coach who would focus on improving Ms. Otto’s leadership and management abilities.
Popular in the corporate world, executive coaching is now attracting interest among charity leaders and grant makers. At a time when growing numbers of nonprofit leaders are leaving their organizations, many of them frustrated with the pressures of fund raising and other aspects of running charities, grant makers hope that coaching will keep such executives from burning out and quitting.
Coaching worked for Ms. Otto, who entered into what became a yearlong arrangement with Vincent J. Pellettieri, a retired corporate executive trained by the Executive Service Corps. Mr. Pellettieri and Ms. Otto met or spoke by telephone for monthly sessions sometimes punctuated by e-mail exchanges.
Today, two years after she called for help, Ms. Otto says that she has learned to do a better job of clarifying employees’ job duties to make sure that other staff members are helping her meet the many evolving needs of her growing organization.
“Job coaching saved my career,” she says. “It allowed me to dedicate time to thinking about what the organization needed and what I needed to stay.”
Coaching Credentials
Executive coaches gain skills in several ways. Some simply take a university course in coaching while others follow all the steps they need to be certified by an accredited coaching school, like the Coaches Training Institute, in San Rafael, Calif., or the Academy for Coach Training, in Edmonds, Wash. Certified coaches earn more-senior designations as they increase the number of hours of coaching they provide.
Some executive coaches who help nonprofit leaders work as independent consultants, while others, like Mr. Pellettieri, are part of a consulting organization that offers such services. Most consultants offer discounted coaching fees for charities, often basing the cost on a charity’s size or budget. Nevertheless, while some coaches have done pro bono work with charity leaders, the cost of hiring a coach can be steep: Fees range from $100 to $350 per hour.
To make sure they get the best results, some charity leaders prefer to enter into a contract with a coach for a set period, with the option of extending the services.
In early meetings, the coach helps nonprofit executives identify problem areas in their careers and develop measurable goals for improvement. The pair then work together to set a timetable for measuring progress toward the goals. Coaching relationships typically last from three months to a year, though some charity officials work with their coaches for much longer.
Kristen Mickey Georges, the former head of the Foundation for Autistic Childhood Education and Support,used a coach for four years. She had been leading her organization for a year when she was introduced to executive coaching through a workshop she attended at CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, a San Francisco management-consulting group. Ms. Georges says she wasn’t floundering and had good skills, but felt she could be doing things better.
“I had so many balls in the air, I wasn’t sure I could think strategically and keep things moving forward,” she says.
The coach helped Ms. Georges through some tough times, including fighting a lawsuit against her organization. Ms. Georges says the coach helped her “see there is light at the end of some very dark tunnels.”
As Ms. Georges found, coaching has personal as well as professional benefits. But it isn’t therapy, says Mary Beth O’Neill, a Seattle consultant and author of Executive Coaching With Backbone and Heart.
“Therapy is a healing process frequently focused on the past,” Ms. O’Neill says, while executive coaching is based on the present and changing behavior.
Productive coaching relationships depend on making sure there is a good match between the coach and client, says Mr. Pellettieri, the coach who worked with Ms. Otto. Charity leaders must be confident that they can share confidential and potentially embarrassing or damaging information with the coach. “If that chemistry is right, then it is nothing but success,” he says.
After a strong match is assured, coaching is about listening, Mr. Pellettieri says, “something most executives don’t do.”
“It is amazing how clients open up,” he says. “They will tell you ‘I’m having a problem.’ You listen, and they tell you. Some go into a lot of detail, some people stop, and then you start questioning. ‘What would you change? Who do you need to talk to?’”
In the ideal situation, coaches, “don’t tell you what to do, they probe why you are making the decision you are making,” says Ms. Otto. “Vince would ask me enough questions to help me understand what was driving me to that decision. And then I could decide if the decision was appropriate.”
During their year together, Ms. Otto and Mr. Pellettieri also focused on her relationships with employees. “Vince taught me how to communicate directly without hemming and hawing or justifying my requests,” Ms. Otto says.
Pushing Honesty
Grant makers who support coaching say that they value how coaches get charity leaders to take a hard look at what they do on the job and why.
“Coaches push people to honesty,” says Christine Kwak, a program director at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich. “They say things no one in the world will have the courage to say so people get the kind of reflection they can’t get anywhere else in their life.”
During a sabbatical from her foundation job, Ms. Kwak spent six months interviewing organizations and individuals involved in executive coaching. She also attended the Coaches Training Institute to become a certified coach herself. Upon her return to Kellogg, she created the Coaching and Philanthropy Project, a two-year nationwide effort started in March to collect data on how charities are using executive coaches and to promote the best uses of coaching in nonprofit organizations. The $600,000 project is being run by CompassPoint and is paid for by Kellogg and two other foundations.
“We still have a lot of questions,” like how coaching can be made affordable to nonprofit leaders without compromising its quality, says Michelle Gislason, a CompassPoint projects director. “We don’t want this to be a rah-rah coach-the-world campaign. We want to help nonprofits become conscious consumers of coaching.”
To be sure, not everyone who hires an executive coach benefits from the experience, and there are barriers to effective coaching. “It shouldn’t be punitive,” says Mallary Tytel, president of Healthy Workplaces, a Sioux Falls, S.D., consulting company that pairs coaches with business and nonprofit executives. On the other hand, she says, “if the individual isn’t interested, doesn’t want to participate, doesn’t take it seriously, or isn’t interested in doing anything differently, those situations are difficult.”
Even when charity leaders are interested, it can be hard to persuade people to pursue a grant, or set aside organizational or personal dollars, for coaching. “If there is a budget cut, that is the first thing that goes,” says Ms. Lipetz of Executive Service Corps.
In other cases, the charity leader’s organization is what makes coaching fail. Coaching for nonprofit leaders is rarely successful when an organization is in crisis, says Mim Carlson, co-author of The Executive Director’s Survival Guide. “Help may be needed but probably not a coach.”
Still, grant makers are seeing enough potential in executive coaching to keep making grants so that more nonprofit leaders get access to it. Ms. Kwak of Kellogg says that foundations should pay for coaching “as normally as they would consider funding strategic planning.”
“It isn’t about funding therapy for someone,” she says. “It is about funding effectiveness.”