One of our largest clients used to run its business from manuals. Sales staff who wanted to know how something should be done would be directed by a senior manager "to look in sales staff manual 108" for the answer. It was not a motivational style of sales management, and had become unsuitable for fast-changing modern business conditions.

So eight years ago, based on our recommendations, the company created what it called "the ultimate service provision" by merging all the information technology (IT) and back-office functions. Sales management broke with old habits and traditional training and decided to improve the sales Leadership skills of the senior managers through coaching.

The outcome has been a resounding success, producing far better results than conventional development training. The evident superiority of coaching explains why more companies are taking the same route and making it a priority.

The Growth of Personal Coaching:

We believe that coaching's rapid growth will continue. Forward-thinking organizations are looking for alternative ways to lead and manage sales staff. The business world has experienced more upheaval in the past 10 years than in the previous 50: It's no accident that this period of unprecedented change has witnessed a boom in executive coaching.

At the moment, one of my senior consultants is coaching a top executive who insists on becoming involved in every detail of the business, causing frustration among his junior executives. "If he's not in a meeting, he feels he's not working,"

I was told. Time-management and delegation courses had done nothing to cure his bad habits, which left him no time for the sort of reflective thinking expected of a senior manager. Coaching, particularly by making him study his own diary and cutting down on the congestion in his day, is already having an impact.

The signs are that the boom will continue. A recent survey that polled HR professionals from Europe, America, Australia and Asia found that 88 percent of the respondents were planning to make more use of professional coaching. A little more than half of the respondents had introduced the practice in the past 18 months.

Like our clients, 70 percent of those polled said that coaching has an edge over conventional development techniques, and they would choose it to change the behavior and performance of senior people.

Coaching vs. Traditional Development Programs:

People may learn a great deal in personal-development courses, but when they return to the workplace, they often have difficulty integrating what they have learned into their day-to-day duties. Quite often, what they may have learned simply slips from their minds.

We believe that between 50 percent and 70 percent of an organization's climate, and hence its effectiveness, can be traced to sales management style. Effective sales Leaders create a favorable working environment that boosts performance. This is where coaching comes into its own. Sales Leadership is a set of skills, competences and attitudes that individuals can develop through practice and by reflecting on their own actions and the impact this can have on others.

Most sales Leadership programs are too general to provide opportunities for such intensive, personalized work. Coaching, by contrast, enables individuals to gain insight into their own motives, interests and concerns. These link explicitly to the challenges they face in their sales Leadership or sales management roles.

Coaching can also help executives acquire a greater awareness of their own sales
Leadership style. This is crucial if they are to develop the variety of styles needed to manage and lead in different situations. All too often, sales Leaders rely on a command-and-control style, which has a negative impact on all but a crisis. Coaching people on sales Leadership styles produces positive results in most situations by creating a supportive environment in which employees feel empowered to give their best and find the solutions to problems.

Coaching: Not Just a Remedial Solution:

Not unnaturally, some diehards still hold with an old-fashioned view that coaching can be used only for remedial purposes, but those organizations that have embraced the concept fully have discarded that way of thinking. Their approach concentrates on sales Leadership and personal development as part of building a high-performance organization -- they are committed to moving away from managing by a culture of process to managing as sales Leaders.

Typically, we find that our clients are not interested in adopting the style of coaching used by many companies to focus on simple issues -- particularly how to get along with fellow team members. They choose us because they believe we offer a more challenging style that digs more deeply into behavior and personality. This leaves executives with something more permanent that they can take away from the coaching sessions and use during the rest of their careers, rather than just as a one-time solution.

It is not always easy to convince executives that they should submit to a scrutiny of their personalities and behavior, but in reality, those executives who balk at taking "the journey of self development" could soon find themselves isolated and lesser sales Leaders than many of their contemporaries.