Can leadership be learned or is it an innate or instinctive ability?

Caitríona Murphy, coach and partner with executive coaching organisation Praesta Ireland, says it can be learned, and argues that there is increasing evidence to support her belief that coaching provides a highly effective learning framework for busy senior executives who want to develop their leadership potential.

"Leadership is about creating followership," says Murphy.

"There are people who naturally create followership but that's not to say that I think it's only an innate thing, that you are born with it.

"A lot of leadership is 99 per cent hard graft, being self-aware and aware of how you are impacting on other people and aware of the messages they are getting from you, the encouragement they are getting from you and the support they are getting from you."

Coaching has its origins in the United States but is coming of age in Ireland, according to Murphy. "In the beginning when we started it was quite a private thing," she explains.

"People wouldn't really want others to know that they had a coach. I think that stems from the fact that years ago coaching was seen as remedial. If you were underperforming you got coached to bring you up to an acceptable level. Certainly as it has translated from the US and UK markets, it is more and more something that high performers want."

But what exactly is coaching and how does it differ from other forms of management training?

"The market is growing but is very diverse," explains Murphy. "You have everything from the life coaching coming from the counselling and motivational speaker end all the way along to senior executive coaching where you are really talking about upping their game in performance terms for their job and their organisation."

Praesta Ireland offers one-to-one coaching programmes tailored to the senior executive's real-life working environment and the challenges he or she faces, according to Murphy.

"It fits in around their working lives," she says. "You don't have to take time away from the busy day job. You just take a few hours out every three or four weeks."

Whereas executive or management courses tend to be removed from their working environment, one-to-one coaching on the job allows them to apply what they learn immediately and directly to their working lives, she says.

The changing nature of work and the workplace has fuelled the demand for coaching.

Organisations are leaner and flatter and promotion is much more rapid. "In the past, before going into leadership positions, people would have had a longer and richer environment in which to learn their trade.

"Now somebody is very often catapulted into a CEO or senior leadership role, having just been head of a function and are expected to know how to motivate other people, how to build the team, oversee the management performance of other people, how to relate upwards to maybe a difficult chairman or a board," she says.

It might be easy to dismiss coaching as a luxury or perk, but Murphy says research from the US and the UK indicates that coaching can have an impact and delivers results.

"There is a return on the investment for it," she says. "It's not just a nice, soft, extra benefit for an executive. "It is a real, hard-edged investment.

"For people at the top, if you get even a 1 per cent improvement in their managing of their team or 1 per cent improvement in the quality of the relationship with the chairman, immediately you're going to have a money effect," she adds.