Clients engaged with us for coaching their senior leaders to move up into managing global roles followed all the four principles stated above and benefited in the span of 8-10 months:
- Improved engagement with customers and turning around relationships with key customers.
- Improved 2nd inline development as a result of effective delegation, communication and career paths.
- Improved cross-functional collaborations and vendor development resulting in improved sales.
- Exceeded the measurement on internal matrices laid down by the organisation.
- Enabled their leaders to feel heard, be themselves (devoid of all titles) and bring their unique strengths to play that made them more joyful, healthy and could lead their teams better.
Determine the value for the coachee – Often organisations would highlight coaching goals as 'Improve communication' , 'Delegate More' , 'Be Assertive' 'Focus on execution and speed' etc. As a Business/HR leader, you may then want to narrow the focus down and ask questions such as 'where is the coachee right now' , 'what is the desired state' , 'what could be the potential outcome and what may be the ripple effect of that outcome' . Once that is done, try figuring out if there is a monetary value that could be assigned to some of those goals. A leader from a large conglomerate mentioned that if she is able to engage her team better through communication, she will contain employee turnover and thus save massive costs in re-hiring and training people. A good practice here is to discuss the same with the coachee and arrive at a common understanding and expectations of the goals so a solution is designed that best serves their coaching needs.
Feedback from the coachee – An effective coaching engagement should also help a coachee integrate learnings and gains from the coaching engagement. The coachee can reflect on how some of the action plans have a direct/indirect impact on his/her leadership effectiveness and therefore the team and organizational effectiveness.
2/3/4 way periodic reviews – A quick periodic review with the coachee/sponsor/line manager/HR can go a long way in determining if each of the stakeholders see progress towards the desired state and the behaviors. One of our clients also assigned mutually agreed sales and employee engagement matrices for the coachee that formed the base for measuring the coachee's behavior in their role, before and after. These reviews help align expectations, are a good 'strategic timeout' period to pause, reflect and re frame goals, if needed.
Holistic Goal setting: A complimentary view on measuring effectiveness also states that exclusive measurement of financial return on investment (ROI) can sometimes be an unreliable way to measure coaching outcomes, and an over-emphasis on financial returns can restrict awareness of hordes of positive outcomes that coaches and organisations can unplug through coaching. During the turbulent times that we are in, leaders and organisations are investing in measuring humanistic metrics like overall well being of an employee, an engaged workforce etc to determine a far more holistic impact of coaching exercise.
