A great deal has been said over the years about demonstrating the value of coaching, and rightly so. When coaching first began to become recognised as a legitimate development option, it was generally a loose arrangement providing a senior manager with an informal opportunity to work on their performance. As the profession of coaching developed, and the investment grew, budget holders needed a way of controlling and measuring what was happening. Entirely reasonable.
However, one of the challenges this presents is that it risks transferring accountability for performance from the client to the coach. This can have serious consequences for the actual result, especially when it comes to sustainability.
When I began training coaches in the mid-1990s, I often used to refer to coaching as the most rewarding, unrewarding task there is. If you are doing it really well, you will be making sure that the client feels totally responsible for the changes they are making to their behaviour and performance. At the extreme, there will be a sense that the coach didn’t really do anything at all. In this way, coaching is a light touch that allows the client to make clear decisions, retain full responsibility, and be credited for making changes that yielded a better result. Then they will do it again, and again.
For the coach, seeing their clients prosper is extremely rewarding. Knowing quietly that they contributed and made a difference. To me, that is a reward greater than the fee involved.
Consequently, any attempt to measure coach performance will damage this ideal. Over the years, I have considered myself to be a conscientious objector of coaching ROI. However, that does not mean I avoid the topic — I’ve developed a simple way to solve the problem.
Firstly, I make sure and drive towards the client defining a specific business/professional goal that they need to achieve, which will involve them stretching their influencing skills. Ideally, this should have some hard tangible numbers against which they can monitor and demonstrate their success. Over the years I’ve found that putting them under pressure to define their goals provides a key lesson for the client. Often the specification we end up with is better than their bosses have achieved. It also creates a massive move in the right direction, just from specifying the result.
The reason for focusing on numbers and tangibility is that this offers them the opportunity to demonstrate categorically later that they have delivered. It also sharpens up their focus on delivery.
Secondly, during my coaching, I am always driving the discussion back to delivering on the goal specified. This makes my coaching extremely practical and also makes implementation more robust. They also continue to make decisions, retain accountability and become conditioned in a new way of working.
Finally, when it is all over (the coaching programme), I ask them to report back to their boss, HR, what progress they have made towards their goal. Some goals may not have been achieved in the timescale of the coaching programme. That is okay; progress and change are what we are looking for.
At the same time, I also ask them to give examples of discussions we have had that have made a contribution to their decisions/actions towards their goal. As you saw earlier in this series, this is documented in a final report for presentation to their boss/HR.
When combined with the initial documentation, this makes for a very robust approach to demonstrating value while maximising ownership by the client. Over the years, I have used this to demonstrate some pretty big results, and I have never had a problem demonstrating the value that I bring to the work.
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