Like For-Profit Managers, Charity Leaders Turn to Career Coaches for Fresh Perspective and Support

JOB MARKET

By Marilyn Dickey

At age 30, Leigh Marecek became executive director of Physicians for a Violence-Free Society, in San Francisco, a nonprofit organization with a staff of five. Her 10 years of experience working at crisis centers as an advocate, fund raiser, public speaker, and manager did nothing to prepare her for reporting to a nonprofit board. She felt intimidated by her trustees, all but one of whom were physicians. She was uneasy confronting them or even asking them for help.

Instead she did what more and more senior-level employees have been doing: She hired a “coach.” She and her coach met once face to face, then drew up a “learning contract” — a list of goals for the coming year. Among the things Ms. Marecek wanted to work on were delegating more work to her board and staff members, keeping her work hours in check, and spending more time pursuing her outside interests of yoga, painting, and dance.

After that initial session, she and her coach, Grace Flannery, started “meeting” by phone in weekly 45-minute conversations.

As an executive director, Ms. Marecek knew that she was supposed to to take the reins of the organization, but it wasn’t easy for her. She worked with her coach on addressing the root causes of her reluctance to take charge. “I wanted to look at the issue of entitlement — being a young executive director working with physician board members,” she says. “We would talk about class and upbringing and how that plays out in our dynamic. Now I’m much more clear and direct and able to tell my board what I need and get respect from them.”

Career coaching, executive coaching, life coaching are all names for a phenomenon that’s gaining currency in the nonprofit field, after having first gained popularity in the business world. Coaches help people make decisions about everything from prickly issues at work — a difficult meeting, a bad performance review, a falling-out with a co-worker — to deciding whether to change jobs or careers, even how to squeeze in more time for hobbies or family. They don’t present solutions to their clients’ problems, but instead work from the assumption that their clients have all the answers but need help bringing them to the surface. “We use artful questions to help them discover their own answers,” says Ms. Flannery.

Furthermore, coaches challenge their clients to take steps to pursue their goals, says Frank Parsons, a coach who works as an adjunct consultant for the Center for Nonprofit Management, in Nashville. Coaches don’t necessarily share their clients’ professional background, says Mr. Parsons, but sometimes being detached from the client’s situation can be an advantage in offering help. “I haven’t walked in your shoes,” he says, “but am giving you a whole different perspective.”

No Preconceived Notions

Talking to a coach can offer clients benefits they can’t get from talking to friends or family, says Lynne Lopez, a coach and director of admissions at Coach U, a company in Salina, Kan., that trains coaches online.

“The first really important piece is that the coach not be vested in the outcome,” she says. Friends and families tend to have preconceived notions about the abilities and limitations of their loved ones. Coaching helps people break out of that mold and take a fresh — and more objective — look at their problems, their work, and their lives.

“Most people are longing to become the kind of person they always dreamed they could be,” says Ms. Flannery. “No one has ever seen them be that person yet.”

It can be lonely at the top, says Ms. Marecek, and a coach can help alleviate that sense of isolation. Executive directors in the nonprofit world tend to work far too many hours on too tight a budget, she says, with no one to support them when they face tough challenges.

The brief conversation she has with her coach each week ends up saving her time as well as headaches, she says: She can work out some issues with her coach in a few minutes that would take her an hour or more to do on her own.

Help at the Crossroads

Coaches have different niches and different approaches to their work, says Anne Rarich, who heads the Learning Exchange, a coaching company in Concord, Mass. “But no two coaches who even went to the same coaching school do it the same way,” she says. Sessions are driven primarily by “artful questions” and other techniques, such as aptitude tests, to bring out answers.

The initial meeting is sometimes face to face, but in some cases, coach and client never meet in person. Subsequent meetings are frequently by phone or e-mail. When clients come to see Ms. Rarich, she says, they fill out questionnaires that include such queries as “Who were some of your heroes when you were growing up?”; “What do you want people to say about you when you’re dead?”; and “If you had all the money in the world, what would you do tomorrow?”

Kevin Nourse, a coach in Washington, uses a variety of tools when he works with clients. When Frances Childre was at a crossroads in her career, she sought Mr. Nourse’s help. “I felt like I was at a dead end. I knew I needed to change jobs, but did not really know whether I needed to change fields, which I didn’t want to do,” says Ms. Childre, who was director of employee health and workers’ compensation at a nonprofit academic health center in the South. (She asked that the name and location of her former and current employers not be identified.)

Mr. Nourse took her through a series of exercises: He told her to envision the future she wanted and write about it as if she were already in the future and looking back on the steps she took to get there. He suggested she make a “vocational lifeline,” noting her career ups and downs and asking her when she felt most engaged, most alive in a job. And he used another exercise to help her analyze potential new jobs. “I had a job offer early last year I was excited about till I realized it would be a mistake,” she says. When she analyzed it with Mr. Nourse’s help, she realized the company was trying to do something that was too ambitious for its limited resources, and that ultimately it wouldn’t take her down the career path she really wanted.

In November, Ms. Childre got a new job that fulfills all of her expectations — working for a company that helps other organizations with their health services — and she credits her coach with guiding her and inspiring her. “He kept reminding me that I had tremendous resources, when it was very hard for me to see that,” she says.

Short- and Long-Term Change

Changing jobs takes time, but changing careers takes longer, which is discouraging for someone who’s miserable at work. But helping people get to where they want to be can be done in stages that improve things little by little. Mr. Nourse says he looks at major changes in three steps: doing something in the current job that can ease the pain, finding a better job at the same organization, and taking the long view toward a job or career that is more satisfying.

Lynne Gilliland Garber, a coach in Baltimore, says she had a client who felt she was stagnating in her upper-management nonprofit job. What she really wanted to do was open a bed and breakfast, but since that takes time and planning, she took an intermediate step of finding a management job in a different nonprofit organization.

“There’s a short-term goal of changing organizations,” Ms. Garber says, “and a longer-term goal of what she wants to do with the rest of her life.”

Careers are more than just a job, says Mr. Nourse — they’re an identity. “We’re not machines,” he says. “When we think about a change in one area, we have to pay attention to other areas. It’s like an organization. You can’t tinker with the strategic plan without looking at how it will affect the whole organization.”

Coaches don’t look at a job or career in a vacuum, but rather at a client’s life as a whole, asking them about their values and interests, and if their lives are full and rounded.

Betsy McWhirt hired Mr. Parsons to be her coach when she wanted to leave a nonprofit group with a $250,000 budget — and board composed of people she says were very young and controlling — and move to a bigger charity where she would have more autonomy as executive director. After several months of coaching, she landed a job as the head of Nashville Reads, a literacy group with a budget of $2.4-million and more resources than her previous employer. She continues to use her coach in her new job, to help with board and staff issues. But he also encourages her to make time for outside interests.

“I have a very creative side to me,” she says. “I’m a former classical singer. Sometimes I’ll be frustrated with what I’m doing and Frank will say, ‘OK, what are you doing to fulfill those personal things in your life?’”

Hiring a Coach

Because anyone can claim to be a coach, it’s a good idea to ask about professional training, approach, and experience and to ask for references, says Ms. Rarich. The International Coach Federation — which does not keep statistics on how many nonprofit workers have sought career coaching — lists coaches who have earned certification on its Web site. The federation certifies coaches at several levels — from associate certified coach, which requires 60 hours of training and 250 hours of coaching experience, to master certified coach, which requires 200 hours of training and 2,500 hours of coaching. (More information on certification is available though the federation’s Web site.)

The profession is so new that most coaches come to it from other careers, such as law, nonprofit work, or human resources, says Ms. Rarich. It can be helpful to find out what the coach’s background is. Some coaches are also consultants in a field, such as fund raising or nonprofit management.

Don’t be afraid to shop around, says Ms. Lopez: “Always interview three coaches before you choose one. And you may want to interview far more.”

Coaches usually offer a free half-hour get-acquainted session, says Ms. Lopez. “You have to click,” she says. “If you feel instantly uncomfortable with him, it’s not going to work.”

Coaching is not cheap. Rates can be $300 a month or more, which might include three or four half-hour or 45-minute sessions. Some coaches charge lower fees for clients who work at nonprofit groups or are unemployed, and some nonprofit-management organizations offer coaching at reduced rates. Mr. Parsons, for example, charges $850 to $900 a day (which can be divided into an hourly rate) for members of the Center for Nonprofit Management, in Nashville. For his corporate clients, he charges $1,500 to $3,000 a day.

In addition to the help clients receive in delineating their goals, says Ms. Rarich, many who undergo coaching find that they gain not only a renewed sense of purpose but also hope. What she finds most satisfying, she says, “is when my client is moving from being constricted with a lack of choices to opening up and recognizing the possibilities.”

In a decade spent working in the nonprofit world, Ms. Maracek has seen low employee morale, high stress levels, and rapid turnover. “Coaching to me is an answer to that,” she says. “At your side, you have this advocate to air all kinds of things.”

Have you tried or would you consider hiring a coach? Why or why not? Tell us what you think in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.