The following are excerpts from an article that originally appeared
in the Feb. 21, 2000 issue of Fortune magazine.

So You're a Player.  Do You Need a Coach?
The hottest thing in management is the executive coach--part boss, part consultant, part therapist.  Who are these people?  And what are they doing in your company?

by Betsy Morris

• "People have to take more responsibility for their own growth and development.  They can't depend on human resources.  Coaches can help people come to grips with huge changes in the way we do work, in getting through big transitions." --Mary Bradford, Sales Manager, Met Life

• Corporate coaching is one of the stranger wrinkles in management these days--one of the hottest things in human resources, except that it doesn't usually come out of human resources.  (In fact, HR is often the last to know.)  It is a grassroots movement that is spreading in some of the unlikeliest corners of corporate America, including IBM, AT&T, and Kodak.

• Coaches are everywhere these days.  Companies hire them to shore up executives or, in some cases, to ship them out.  Division heads hire them as change agents.  Workers at all levels of the corporate ladder, fed up with a lack of advice from inside the company, are taking matters into their own hands and enlisting coaches for guidance on how to improve their performance, boost their profits, and make better decisions about everything from personnel to strategy.
  
  It's not that executive coaching is particularly new.  Chief executives and those approaching the top have long sought counsel from personal consultants, wise board members, or industrial psychologists.  But in the past five years coaching has gone mass-market.  In the age of Every Man for Himself, every man can have a coach--and, in an ever more commonly held view, needs one.

• "Coaching is becoming something of a heavy industry.  It's amazing," says Warren Bennis, professor of business administration at the University of Southern California's business school.
  
  What exactly is a coach?  Part personal consultant, part sounding board, part manager.  Yes, manager.  Remember him?  That person whose job used to be to advise, motivate, and train--but whose nose is now mostly stuck in email?  For a surprising number of people, it is now the coach--not the boss--who pushes them to hire, to fire, to fine-tune a sales pitch, to stretch.
  
  Observers of the phenomenon say that an executive coach often functions as a therapist, too--though the coaches themselves tend to deny this with some fury.  Warren Bennis believes that "a lot of executive coaching is really an acceptable form of psychotherapy.  It's still tough to say, 'I'm going to see my therapist.'  It's okay to say, 'I'm getting counseling from my coach.'"
  
  If ever stressed-out corporate America could use a little couch-time, it's now.  Trust in big companies is at an all-time low.  Baby-boomers have been burned; Gen Xers aren't expecting the Corporation to take care of them.  Under the circumstances, employees are much likelier to go outside and get independent advice to help them be better managers, says Karen Cates, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management.  Beyond that, she says, mentoring systems have mostly failed.  Organizations are so lean that they don't have time for it.  You're paid for what you produce, not for time you spend developing people.  Bosses are managing by e-mail.  "Given the impersonal nature of business today, we're likely to say, 'Go take that hill--and, oh, by the way, send me an e-mail when you get there,'" says Charles F. Cleary, chief operating officer of Log On America, a telecommunications and Internet service provider in Providence.
  
  Times could hardly be more trying for people all up and down the corporate ladder.  Woe to the boss who's too authoritarian; he'll just cost the corporation good talent.  Woe to the manager who leans too heavily on hierarchy; virtual teams call for flexible leaders who can pull together strangers in distant parts of the country and, for the duration of a project, get them to bury their personal agendas and work together.  Meanwhile, the major currency of the manager--experience--has never been so devalued.  "You can't turn to your nice gray-haired mentor and say, 'From your 30 years of experience, how does one handle a dot-com?'" says Barry Mabry, a partner at Ernst & Young who is using coach.  "Nobody on earth has experienced this kind of business environment."
  
  What's really driving the boom in coaching, says John Kotter, professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, is this: "As we move from 30 miles an hour to 70 to 120 to 180...as we go from driving straight down the road to making right turns and left turns to abandoning cars and getting on motorcycles...the whole game changes, and a lot of people are trying to keep up, learn how not fall off."

• But right now coaches are so hot that credentials are almost beside the point.  What seems to matter most is word of mouth--did the coaching work miracles for somebody you know?  Corporate coaches are in such demand that they can charge from $600 to $2,000 a month for three or four 30- to 60-minute phone conversations.  Some charge as much as $400 an hour.  So a lot of them are earning far more than psychologists or psychiatrists.

• Another way to look at the spread of coaching is that is bridges the growing chasm between what managers are being asked to do and what they have been trained to do.  It is almost like the difference between generals in peacetime and generals in war, says Harvard's Kotter.  "We have a lot of people who were trained to be superb managers but now have horrendous leadership challenges thrown at them.  I think a lot of the coaching is aimed at trying to help people develop skills and actions that are different from what they grew up with."

• At many companies, coaching has become the Band-Aid for a lot of the dysfunction caused by the trial and error of doing business in new ways.  Matrixed organizations, 360-degree performance reviews, virtual teams--they don't always work as well in practice as in theory.

• "Executives now are so challenged," she says.  "When you bring a group together around a task, people become commodities for the sake of the task.  They get lost."

• Ernst partner Barry Mabry has found a coach to be a valuable sounding board in today's crazy business climate.  He'd received a notice last year telling him that coaching would be available to Ernst & Young partners.  He made a call and soon found himself on the phone with "a strange woman."  [sic]  "I was in New Orleans; she was in San Francisco.  She didn't know much about my area of work," he recalls.  But within 20 minutes, he decided she could be both trusted and helpful.  Ever since, he has had routine telephone conversations with her in which he has discussed matters ranging from the mundane (how to improve communications with subordinates) to the cosmic (what do you want to get out of life?).  "Why do I need a coach?" he muses.  "I've wrestled with this."  He's a corporate finance partner in New Orleans.  He has been with Ernst 27 years.  He's successful; he's happy.  His recent performance review was quite flattering.  "Perhaps it's for the same reason that Tiger Woods needs a coach or Pete Sampras needs a coach," says Mabry.  "Tiger Woods would say, 'I know how to play golf.'  But his coach is probably the most important person in his life."
  
  The coaching phenomenon, like all mass movements, will have its excesses; dubiously credentialed people hanging out their shingles, no doubt; conflicting advice and agendas, quite possibly, in offices where Everyman has a coach.  But corporate America had better heed the phenomenon, even if it falls outside the traditional corporate organizational chart.  It's a reminder that people won't run on autopilot or by remote e-mail.  No matter how much the world has changed, people on the job still need some mentoring, some monitoring, some meaningful interaction.  And if workers can't get that in-house, why they're likely to outsource it.