Executive coaching is brilliant!
It can alter behaviours, drive change and transform organisations.
It really can.
But even executives who’ve received coaching find it difficult to nail down with any accuracy the difference their coaching has made.
As for other stakeholders in the coaching within your client company, such as the coaching participant’s line manager, the budget holder paying for the coaching and human resources, whatever they think can only be guesswork.
Unless, that is, you work with the coaching participant and line manager to measure the difference your coaching makes and report results to all stakeholders.
But what’s to tell?
Well, for a start, you can report on the positive changes for the coaching participant
Nadira wasn’t managing communication with her team effectively, leading to them and her feeling frustrated and demotivated, and having a negative impact on individual and team performance.
Through her coaching Nadira has worked on ensuring all interactions with team members are timely, unearth all the issues and get to the right decision quickly and without confusion.
You can also report on the positive changes for those around the participant
Nadira’s team are more self-sufficient than they used to be. Before her coaching team members were constantly dragging her into operational issues, which she wanted them to sort out themselves.
Now they keep Nadira informed and have developed a process for stepping up her involvement as necessary.
And not forgetting the positive changes to the wider business
The changes Nadira has made have led to increased revenue, which is up by 12% in the last two quarters.
In addition, Nadira’s team are better motivated and less stressed, and sickness absence is down over the last two quarters by ½ a day per person.
As a result Nadira has been freed up to focus on how her team works with the professional services team. This has led to better utilisation of resources, due to improvements in communication and scheduling, which has reduced the costs for this part of the business and improved their revenue per client.
The professional services team are now rolling out the same working model to all teams they work with globally.
Clearly, you can only report the results you actually get and you can’t claim that your coaching was the sole contributing factor in achieving them.
However, you can show there is a relationship between your coaching and business results.
You can then facilitate a discussion between the coaching participant and line manager to agree the shape and extent of the relationship.
The strength of this approach is that, because you’ve worked with the two key players in your coaching engagement to nail down exactly what has been achieved, the results will be well understood by them and others in their organisation.
This, ultimately, is what your client company wants – clear and credible evidence of the difference your coaching makes.
In turn, it’s what you want – evidence the client company can use to decide whether to purchase more coaching from you.
Oh, and of course, you can use the same evidence to win over potential clients too.
So, don’t just tell your clients and potential clients coaching is brilliant.
Demonstrate it!
One Response
How do you explain coaching?
Do you find it difficult to explain what coaching is all about?
Do you end up explaining the coaching process when you might be better off explaining the value it brings to your clients?
Interested to hear what you think.