Andy Firth is one of the Management Futures team now providing specialist coaching tuition to the Ministry of Defence. He reports on a successful earlier project

Asked to name the organisational climate most conducive to the coaching of staff, you would be pretty unlikely to come up with the Royal Marines. At least not unless you were very well informed.

The traditional outsider’s view of the Marines is of a highly directive command culture where the instructions of leaders are carried out without question. Perhaps supporting the perception of a macho culture is the fact that only one woman has ever successfully completed the Marines training programme.

However, this view is based on a number of false assumptions and today the Marine Corps offers some of the most convincing hard evidence of the power of coaching as a management approach.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting and talking with two men from the Corps, Warrant Officer Clive Gill and Sergeant Martin Isaacs, known to all as ‘Izzy’. They work together providing instruction in coaching skills to the teams of instructors at Commando Training Centre.

Obviously, a coaching approach is only one of the ways in which Marine instructors work with their recruits, but it is one that has reaped rich dividends and has generated interest across the Army, Navy and Air Force. It was also instrumental in heading off a potential crisis for the Marines.

Clive and Izzy explained that in 1998, a Captain Scott conducted a management review of the Corps that showed that not enough was being done to prepare Marine trainers to train recruits. This was because they were largely operational Marines being asked to pass on skills and knowledge without being trained as trainers.

Shortly afterwards the Institute for Naval Medicine conducted a physiological review for the CTC that led to improvement in the physiological areas of training, for example prevention of and recovery from injury.

However, Royal Marines Headquarters were still concerned with falling retention rates of trained Marines. Says Izzy, "We were losing people hand over fist – we were about 500 marines short". Coupled with this was a 50% opt out rate for recruits on the training programme. Questions began to be raised about the long-term viability of the Corps.

Get down to get up

Adie Shariff, an occupational psychologist at the INM, commissioned a psychological review of recruit troop training, employing Professor Lou Hardy of the Institute for the Psychology of Elite Performance at Bangor University, and Professor Graham Jones of Loughborough University.

They found two main problems for recruits. They were experiencing a loss of confidence and a loss of focus on goals. Result: low motivation and understanding of purpose.

Once one or both of these happened, the Marines culture did not help them to re-establish either. Clive told me how Prof Hardy described the situation: ‘He painted a picture of our culture being embodied by the instructor standing at the top of a six foot wall and kicking recruits off as they try and climb it. If they succeed in getting over the wall in spite of this, then they are allowed to join the club. Instead, Lou argued, we should be at the bottom of the wall offering recruits a leg-up".

Profs Hardy and Jones found an absence of the coaching skills necessary to enable this shift in approach. They therefore recommended that the Marines set up their own cell of people to train the trainers – to instruct the marine instructors in coaching skills.

Clive and Izzy were selected as, in their words, "the most likely to succeed". Clive was already a known quantity and Izzy, as an instructor of 14 years’ experience, carried credibility with the training troop. They undertook a series of workshops with Profs Hardy and Jones and went live in December 2001, delivering the first training package to one of the 16 training teams at CTC.

Suspicion encountered

Initially, the focus was entirely on training and supporting those trainers dealing with recruits. At first there was quite a bit of resistance. The ‘six foot wall’ culture was thoroughly embedded and the associated attitude could only be described as institutionalised. Suspicion of the motive behind this new way of doing things was rife and there were fears that getting recruits to innovate and use initiative more often would lead them to question leadership decisions, undermining the whole chain of command. Money being spent on what was perceived as a ‘pink and fluffy’ exercise was understandably queried.

Clive and Izzy were the only two people undertaking this large task. They persisted, encouraged, supported and cajoled, training more and more instructors in how to use coaching skills in the Marine environment. Through ‘walking the talk’ and by keeping at it, they began to influence those around them. And when the instructors started using the things they were learning, shifts in performance of recruits became apparent.

A questionnaire sent to recruits showed real and tangible results. It tested 14 key performance indicators (such as welfare support, contingent reward, and recreation and social cohesion). The returns showed improvements in 12 of these 14.

The drop-out rate decreased and last year, for the first time in several years, the number of recruits passing out of training and joining the Corps (referred to as "‘gains to trained strength") met target.

These improvements have been directly linked to the changes in training practice associated with adopting the coaching approach. Now that they are being given that leg up rather than a kick, the recruits are more focused on goals, have greater morale and their self-confidence has risen.

Coaching interventions have been extended to include marines who have already passed out.

The Army, Navy and Air Force more generally have become interested as they have in other coaching initiatives and Clive and Izzy are helping to spread the word throughout the forces. They are grateful for the help and support of Profs Hardy and Jones, and to Adie Shariff, without whom the programme might not have got off the ground.

Clive and Izzy are two true believers in the power of using a coaching approach and are determined to help the process succeed.