Measuring coaching engagement success
Coaching. It's a hot topic and its use to accelerate leader development is on the rise. You've heard of its benefits and how it can transform leaders, teams, and organizations, but you want to make sure your leaders are seeing the benefits. How do you justify continued use and investment? It starts with knowing how to measure the impact of coaching.
At FlashPoint, we recognize that each leader and each company is unique, so coaching can't be a one-size-fits-all approach. As a result, we first work with the company to define what success looks like and understand how best to measure it. We then work with the coachees and their managers to help match them with the right coach, identify areas of focus, and clearly define the desired outcomes.
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Now, let's dive in a little bit deeper . . .
What does success look like?
Many leadership coaching engagements focus on similar topics according to The Conference Board's Global Executive Coaching Survey (2017):
- Leading teams and people development (82%)
- Executive presence and influence (74%)
- Strategic thinking and vision (45%)
- Relationship management (42%)
- Communication/presentation skills (32%)
To measure coaching, it's best to start with the focus area(s) of the engagement and determine how you would measure success in that area. For example, measurement strategies will vary widely if the focus of the engagement is on development (to prepare a leader for a future role) in comparison to performance (reducing gaps and building capabilities in a current leadership role).
How to measure coaching success
At FlashPoint, we measure coaching engagements in a few different ways, but it always starts by getting agreement on what success looks like up front. This is both at the organizational level and the individual leader level. We ask coachees, their managers, and the coach to complete evaluations throughout the process and we show them the questions we'll be asking. Not only does it create a more transparent process, but when coachees know that the coach will be evaluating their level of engagement, they are definitely more likely to be engaged!
Other ways we commonly measure coaching success include:
- Progress made between pre- and post-360-degree assessments
- Completion or progress toward individual development plans/action plans
- Annual goal achievement
- Leader/employee retention
- Leader/employee levels of engagement
- Rate of promotion or promotability
A study by Brandon Hall Group shows that coaching is highly effective-even surpassing classroom training’s effectiveness for leader development (2016-2017). If you're not using it yet (or not using it widely), it's time to start and that begins by being able to show results!
