By Sarah Underwood
I wouldn't be where I am today without both formal and informal coaching," says a partner in a Big Five consulting firm.
"My experience has been and continues to be a good one. The firm has listened and responded to my project preferences and training requests. A good coach can make all the difference in the world. Do not hesitate to ask for a new coach if you are unhappy with your current coach," says one consultant. '
Another comments: "When you join this firm, it's up to you to establish and seek out mentoring relationships. You will be assigned a mentor, but it's a two-way street, so don't sit back and wait for your mentor to make something happen."
And finally: "The firm has a very dynamic, positive culture, but you are on your own with regard to career advancement. If you don't play good politics, you may be limited in growth and opportunities."'
Diverse views indeed, but, interestingly, all these quotes come from the same firm, suggesting that mentoring — or coaching, as some prefer to call it — is a very personal thing, dependent not only on the individual, but also on those encountered along the way.
This firm is PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where mentoring (or "coaching" here) is today a central component of the firm's human capital strategy. In fact, the firm's mentoring initiatives played no small part in helping the firm to be counted among our "Ten Best Consulting Firms to Work For" (Consulting, May 2001). While PwC received high grades from its consultants in a variety of areas, nowhere did it score higher than on mentoring offerings.
Of those PwC consultants who responded to our survey, some 95 percent said that they had a mentor, the largest percentage for that category among all the consultancies. When questioned about whether their mentor was valuable, 84 percent responded in the affirmative, putting PwC in second place behind only McKinsey & Company., where 94 percent claimed a mentor and 91 percent said such a relationship was valuable.
In a time-honored tradition, McKinsey declines to discuss its people and human resource policies, claiming they are its competitive edge. It must be doing something right, though, for its consultants to feel so strongly about the value of mentoring. In some part, the statistics bear out the firm's reluctance to talk about the subject, as its mentoring and development programs, known to be of core value within the firm, are obviously pleasing their very targets and creating an environment in which ladders can be climbed and aspirations met.
Looking at the statistics more callously, the mentor and apprenticeship relationship is so ingrained within the firm that mentors are evaluated at all levels on their ability to deliver against the mentoring contract — and that could include both compensation and promotion.
McKinsey is not alone in this respect, with PwC following a similar pattern: Mentoring/coaching is organized on a formal basis; all consultants are encouraged to make use of the scheme; the coached quickly become the coaches; and the coaches' skills in developing the next generation of business leaders are taken into account as part of their annual performance review.
"Every employee has a coach because, in consulting, you don't have one boss or work on one project. We wanted to provide a consistent person who could help an individual develop a career across projects and help the employee meet his or her objectives across the firm," explains Tracey Amabile, human resources leader for PwC Management Consultancy Services across the Americas.
Over the past 18 months, however, and since the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand, the enlarged consultancy has been making significant efforts to enhance its coaching program and weave it more deeply into the culture of the firm. Any impact on a coach's fee-earning hours is accommodated, and there are codes for time spent on both sides of the coaching equation. Coaching can be contributive to the "people score" in an annual review based on PwC's balanced scorecard covering an individual's added value to clients, people, and the firm. And at the end of the day, the coach also plays a major role in walking through the consultant's performance review with him or her and setting a career plan for the coming year.
"There's a real desire for us to embed coaching in our culture all the time, not just as a formal program," says Amabile. "People are happy to give support to those around them, but they're just not sure how to do it, and it's not second nature yet."
But do consultants really want to share all they know with the guy at the next desk? According to Amabile, coaching on such an informal level is not competitive as a big part of the culture and, again, the annual performance review is about knowledge-sharing. If the firm's internal surveys are anything to go by, consultants broadly approve of the scheme, with the major criticism only that coaches are not always as responsive as their prot
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.