Blog Post

Because you’re not worth it

Oct 22, 2020
Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplas

“Oh” said the head of HR “I can only spend that sort of money on the senior team.”

It’s an interesting fact that the more senior you are, the more you are paid and the more is spent on your development.  This has remained true for at least the last 20 years.  Few people seem to question why great coaching is only available to the few? 

It has remained true as the world of work has changed, from the extremes of command and control to the extremes of agile.  The less you are paid the less your company will spend on your development.

There is a real paradox here. It is one that Covid and Black Lives Matter have laid bare.

Covid because it has levelled down organisations.  If there is no executive floor, no corner office, but everyone equal on a Zoom call, then the value added by senior leaders is increasingly being called in to question and the need for leadership at all levels in a Covid world is increasingly obvious.

 Leaders pay lip service to BLM and other forms of diversity.  They bemoan the lack of talented people of colour and fund academics to investigate why, like women, people from the BLM community, however talented, rarely make it to the top of the management tree.  Yet they are not prepared to invest disproportionately in those people who will make a real difference to the success of an organisation.  Instead they set up “women’s networks”, “black networks” - anything but spend real money.

It is clear that we need to change the way we look at the development of leadership and start to invest in a way that brings equality of spending.

After a career of running companies large and small, followed by ten years of coaching senior leaders, I am more than ever convinced that the only way to develop leadership is to democratise coaching. To make it outcome focused, value for money, using the best digital tools available and to do so at a cost the allows all levels of the organisation to benefit.

Because Right Now, We Need Great Leaders Everywhere