Business coaching is growing rapidly in Brazil, but variable quality remains an issue, reports Stephen Eisenhammer from Rio de Janeiro
Business coaching in Brazil has been growing significantly in the past few years, with a major escalation in the number of coaches, coaching companies and training providers. It has spread rapidly from its beginnings in the Brazilian subsidiaries of big international firms, to large national companies such as industrial conglomerate Votorantim, and even now to many mid-size businesses and the public sector.
According to Joseph O’Connor, co-founder of Lambent do Brasil – the first coaching company in the country – there was an explosion in coaching in Brazil in 2007-8. “Before that you had two or three coaching companies at the most, now you have hundreds,” he says.
The International Coach Federation (ICF) has been party to this growth, its Brazilian branch having seen an increase from 26 members in 2009, to a little short of 300 by the beginning of 2012. It started offering accreditation in the country in 2006.
Remarkable shift
The shift has been remarkable for those who have worked in the industry during this period, most of whom received their training abroad and moved to Brazil when coaching was still widely unknown. “It was shocking for me when I started work in Brazil five years ago that people didn’t know what coaching was. You would say that word and you could see a question mark being stamped on people’s face,” says Paula Noschese, president of the Latin America division of American coaching firm, Inside Us.
There is currently, however, an “increasing awareness” of coaching in Brazil among major companies, according to Noschese. She says this is mostly a result of the rising fluidity of the Brazilian job market. Previously, many employees would remain with the same company in the same city for a large part of their career. However, with Brazil now commanding a growing presence in the world economy and attracting increasing foreign investment, the job market has changed dramatically.
“I work with a lot of Brazilians who are changing sectors…. it’s a different dynamic; a different culture; a different way of doing business, and a coach can help this transformation,” she explains. She adds that the other big change in the job market that has affected coaching is the increasing number of people immigrating.
“Brazil is a huge potential market now – all companies are looking into it…that means they are bringing a lot of international people here and these people sometimes need help adjusting.”
The Latin aspect
Yet, despite the growing importance being attributed to coaching in human resources departments across Brazil, there still remain challenges within the coaching sessions themselves.
Noschese notes what she calls “the Latin aspect”, which she described as “a level of resistance to opening up”, particularly among male clients.
“Men have to be tough, they have to be strong and they tend sometimes to be emotionally immature. I see that a lot.”
She spends a great deal of time working on the emotional development of male managers.
ICF president for Brazil, José Augusto Figueiredo (also president for Latin America for international consultancy company Lee Hecht Harrison), agreed that in the region, many people struggle to engage with their coach.
“I see a difference in our anthropology, in Latin people – especially in Brazil. People are quite uncomfortable talking about themselves, and occasionally, you feel people should go to psychoanalysis before coaching,” he says.
Filling the gap
However, Figueiredo believes this makes coaching even more important: “We feel that down here [in Brazil] a lot of the training or business schools are limited in terms of educating people in how to deal with emotional and social competence. Coaching is trying to fill that gap,” he explains.
A study by UK-based global professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers commissioned by the ICF and part of which was published this February, found that 29 per cent of coaches in Latin America and the Caribbean registered growth in the number of clients, fees, sessions and revenues in 2011, making it the joint fastest growing region in the world alongside Asia.
According to this study, the trend is set to continue, with 84 per cent of coaches in Latin America and the Caribbean expecting to see an increase in their annual revenues over the next 12 months.
A need for maturity
But experienced coaches were quick to remark that despite these impressive predictions, the coaching market here still lacks maturity. A frequent complaint is that many of those currently presenting themselves as coaches actually lack decent training, and are damaging the reputation of the industry. This problem is two-sided, with many schools offering poor service on the one hand and clients not showing enough critical scrutiny in their choice of coaches, on the other. “It is already affecting [and] damaging the market,” says Andrea Lages, CEO of Lambent.
Lages, who co-founded Lambent in 2002, has been influential in establishing coaching as an important industry in Brazil. However, she said she has seen first-hand the negative impact that poorly trained and unprofessional coaches have on the sector.
She recounts a recent interaction with the human resources department of a big Brazilian company who told her: “We need coaching, but we can’t call it coaching because this company has had a bad experience in the past [with the practice].”
Much of the problem, according to O’Connor, has to do with a lack of understanding around coaching. “There doesn’t seem to be a critical evaluation of the factors involved,” he says. This is often a result of Brazilian subsidiaries receiving orders from headquarters to get coaching, but not fully understanding how to make the most of the resource, he says: “Houston said we need to have coaching, so let’s find a coach… But people don’t know what questions to ask”. The upshot of this, he says, is that clients often choose their coaches based on price, which can have negative consequences.
Setting standards
O’Connor describes Brazil as “a bit of a Wild West” in terms of the variety of coaching that is currently offered, which is not exactly helping the market’s credibility. “Basically, 10 years ago if you wanted a sexy job you called yourself a consultant – now you call yourself a coach,” he says, adding that this has led to a market in which there is “very little consensus on what a coach actually is”.
In lieu of this, the ICF’s Figueiredo has been at the forefront of the industry in terms of attempting to assert greater quality control over the local coaching sector. “We basically saw that the market is a strange one, because there is no point of reference. So, the ICF accreditation has been very welcome. Human resources departments from the very big companies like the security the ICF accreditation offers – it is a mark of quality,” Figueiredo says.
Many efforts to establish a general standard for coaching in Brazil have thus been aimed at educating companies to be more critical in the way they select their coaches; rather than at the coaches themselves.
“I realised that I didn’t have leverage over the coaching companies – but I did over the clients. So, I started a channel to communicate with them and found out what they need and what they want to know,” says Figueiredo.
The result has been a series of media appearances to try and raise awareness of what coaching is.
Despite the difficulties facing the sector, Noschese remains confident. “The major problem here is less regulatory or systematic, but rather the maturity of the market,” she says. “The market is still very immature, so we accept anything. But over time the role of the coach will become clearer.”
Case study: LHH coaching for the 2016 Olympic Games Committee
International talent solutions company Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH) (which acquired Drake Beam Morin in September last year), is currently being commissioned to offer coaching solutions to Brazil’s 2016 Olympic Games Committee, on the back of LHH’s pioneering success offering coaching to Brazil’s 2007 Pan American Games Committee.
“We helped put together 200 managers from different backgrounds to work together around the same cause and mission,” says José Augusto Figueiredo, president of LHH’s Latin America division.
The project was an important milestone for coaching in Brazil, as it marked an increasing awareness of the profession within the country’s massive public sector and demonstrated the significant role the profession could play in Brazil’s continuing development.
And the 2016 Olympic Games Committee is an even bigger project: LHH will play a vital role in conjunction with its human resources department, assisting in the growth of the committee in the run-up to the world’s biggest sporting event, which will be held in Rio de Janeiro, in August 2016.
“Twenty-five senior managers and directors will be coached to improve their management skills and to achieve greater performance and results,” says Figueiredo, in what he describes as “a massive project”.
The challenge facing the games committee is the rate of growth that needs to be achieved over the coming years while simultaneously maintaining efficiency and transparency. The number of its employees will grow more than 10 times over the next four years, increasing from its current size of 200 to between 2,000 and 3,000 employees, he says. Details on the precise nature of the project, including the type of coaching work and the number of coaches that will be involved, have yet to be announced.
Coaching at Work Volume 7, issue 5