A non-profit society aims to educate public on the benefits of business coaching
Four leading executive coaches have joined forces to form the Thailand Coaching Society to promote and uphold standards for advising and guiding the country's business executives.
Besides setting up the first such organisation in the Kingdom, Kriengsak Niratpattanasai, Jean-Francois Cousin, Apiwut Pimolseangsuriya and Potchanart Seebungkerd recently commissioned a survey on the effectiveness of executive coaching, also the first of its kind in Thailand, as they prepare to publish the book "Untold Stories of Executive Coaching ... and Keys to Unlock People's Potential".
They hope the book will be finished next year, said Apiwut, managing director of the Orchid Slingshot consultancy.
He said the Thailand Coaching Society was set up as a venue for disseminating and exchanging knowledge on coaching matters for the benefit of the general public, without any aim for profit or commercial purposes.
"All of us have our hands full of work already," Apiwut said.
Despite its bright prospects, executive coaching is an emerging industry in Thailand, where many people still have no clear understanding what it is all about, some have abused it, and some have complained about its effectiveness, he said.
"If we want the profession to grow, we need to educate the market," Apiwut said.
According to the survey, 39 per cent of coaching programmes conducted in Thailand were focused on talent development, 33 per cent addressed behavioural issues, and the remaining 28 per cent focused on performance problems.
This is similar to the trends in the US and Europe, where, according to a recent Harvard Business Review study, executive coaching has become less about fixing problem behaviour and more about enhancing the performance of valued executives, said Kriengsak, a founder of TheCoach.
Participants in the survey indicated that the most effective ways to improve organisational performance were on-the-job training (82.6 per cent) and one-on-one coaching (82.1 per cent). Traditional training/lecturing was ranked 10th in a list of 13 means to develop people. This strongly reflects disappointment with classroom-type training among human-resource professionals and senior management, he said. E-learning and reading received the worst scores.
As for behaviour improvement, one-on-one coaching came out as the preferred approach, winning 82 per cent of votes, separated by a wide margin from the runner-up, mentoring (74 per cent). Project assignment and on-the-job training were in the third position. Ninety-three per cent of participants who either had been coached or knew someone who had been said they would use coaching again.
Those who said they would not use coaching again cited such reasons as costs too high for small and medium-sized enterprises, "no need at the moment", "we have internal coaches in the company", or "progress won't last long".
"Coachees' fear of change" and coaches' lack of experience/credentials were the two main pitfalls of coaching in Thailand.
Cousin said some business executives who had successfully grown in their careers failed to understand why they needed to be coached for adjusting their behaviour. But as Dr Marshall Goldsmith wrote in his best-selling "What Got You Here Won't Get You There", senior executives have to be aware of external changes, and come to realise they need to adjust some behaviour to retain and motivate newer-generation staff, said the managing director of 1-2 Win.