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Spotlight on Grant Ledgerwood

By Mike Levy (June 2005 Issue)
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If coaching is reaching maturity, then it’s thanks to people like Horatio Nelson and Dr Grant Ledgerwood. Currently Director of Academic Research for The UK College of Life Coaching (UKCLC) and the College of Executive Coaching, Ledgerwood is writing a book about Nelson’s unique leadership qualities and drawing some interesting conclusions about coaching. Ledgerwood is part of that growing movement which seeks to professionalise the coaching industry. ‘We are still in an age when anyone can go for a half-day course on becoming a coach, stop at the motorway services to have his business cards printed and set up in business the next morning,’ he says.

Ledgerwood, a former MBA director at the University of Greenwich and a visiting professor at many US and European universities, has been at the heart of the move to provide coaching courses with recognised accreditation. There’s an increasing number of MA courses in coaching at universities such as Middlesex, Sheffield Hallam and Liverpool, and Ledgerwood currently advises Oxford Brookes University on the world’s first doctorate in coaching – due to begin in September 2005. ‘The course already has 17 candidates; that’s incredible,’ he enthuses.

He also is external examiner on their MA coaching staff and contributes to the new academic publications such as the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. His most recent paper is entitled, ‘From strategic planning to strategic coaching: evolving conceptual frameworks to enable changing business cultures’. He argues that enterprise networks require forms of HR development substantively different from what he labels as ‘high-compliance training regimes’. Networks depend on entrepreneurs rather than replicators, he says and adds in his paper that evidence is beginning to suggest that corporate coaching offers a ‘supremely effective method of supporting corporate entrepreneurs and a culture of innovation and risk taking’. His view on training is that classroom-based approaches will soon become a thing of the past. There is, he argues, so much hard evidence of the sheer effectiveness of coaching that traditional methods of training and learning will be replaced within the next few years.

Ledgerwood is already seeing the impact of coaching at the highest levels in British industry and government. ‘I was recently talking to a very senior civil servant – one who has regular access to her minister; they have introduced executive coaching into her ministry and found it so effective at senior levels that they want to extend the service to every member of staff. Also there are the senior executives at Deutsche Bank who are such champions of coaching that managers throughout the bank have said: ‘Now we want to get coached.’ Ledgerwood says that a real sign of maturity is that coaching is no longer perceived as something you do only when you have a problem.

Ledgerwood’s involvement in the burgeoning world of coaching doesn’t stop in Britain. He is currently in negotiation with some serious financial backers who are looking to create one or more private universities that will offer a coaching model of learning. Like Oxbridge? ‘It is no coincidence that our most successful universities offer a tutorial system that has many elements of the coaching model,’ he replies.

His colleagues at UKCLC are at the centre of a global boom in coaching with coach training courses starting in Dubai, the USA and especially the Far East, and China. With extensive experience of Chinese students, he is finding that the thirst for coaching is insatiable. ‘They are the oldest and most sophisticated culture in the world and now realise that the last few centuries have been a big mistake,’ he says. ‘They are hungry to catch up and perhaps even overtake the West, and they have come to realise that coaching provides the most powerful learning model of all. What is going on out there is enormously exciting.’

Apart from his visits and lectures, Ledgerwood still finds time to write books. His latest, due to be published this year, looks at leadership but from an unusual angle: the deck of an 18th-century warship. ‘Horatio Nelson provides us with an excellent and timely lesson in the principles of effective leadership,’ he explains. In his book on Britain’s most famous naval commander, Ledgerwood argues that Nelson was a supremely effective leader because he understood that, in the end, individuals make things happen. ‘Nelson offers us a model of what coaching is all about. We talk a lot about the “organisation”, but he knew that a successful ship was all about its people and how you release the potential of human beings.’

Ledgerwood has studied Nelson’s leadership methods and derived what he calls the ‘Trafalgar Principles’. The Admiral, he argues, was a rule breaker who had a huge capacity to motivate his men. The reason, he says, is that he knew each person – from lowly cabin boy upwards – had a key role to play in the success of a battle. ‘Each crew member had, said Nelson, a key role to play and the leader’s role was to ensure that he was properly equipped to carry it out.’ Ledgerwood’s point is that Nelson instinctively understood that the key to success was the empowerment of the individual: every person should be master of his or her own task. In other words, coaching is the key but there is a very old principle at play here: duty. ‘That’s a very old-fashioned word, but Nelson understood it to mean that every member of the team goes beyond personal benefit.’

Going beyond the norm is par for the course for Grant Ledgerwood. Though in his mid-60s, the word ‘retirement’ never reaches his lips. ‘The explosion of coaching across the world is so exciting and challenging that I can see another 30 years of work that is going to be totally engaging and above all fun,’ he concludes. One gets the impression that Nelson would have expected no less.

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