I am putting a proposal together for a major client who wants to instil a culture of 'managers as coaches' throughout his organisation. Although he is convinced of its merits, he wants us to show how we can guarantee and, more importantly, measure the success of training managers to be coaches -in order that he can convince his board to make the investment.
Can anyone suggest a cost effective realistic way of measuring the success of coaching?
Andrew Hayward
4 Responses
Is that a chicken or an egg?
Andrew
The answer is “What does a coach do, according to your client?”
Once you know that you have the yardstick you seek.
Unfortunately I suspect thaty this *may* be a case of wanting what everyone else has got without actually knowing what that is.
I realise that business is business, but maybe you need to start by educating your client on the ins and outs of “coaching”.
Do they actually want managers who are “coaches” (dream on!), or managers who will give more attention to mentoring and training their staff (very sensible)?
The clearer you can get your client to be about what they want, the easier your job – and the greater their satisfaction – in the long term.
If you’re expected to draw up a proposal without establishing the appropriate guidelines I’d say that you acquiesce at your peril.
The End Goal
First of all, I would try to not find myself in a situation where I had to “guarantee” anything, as there are many factors that will impact on a trainee’s abilty to improve their performance, not least the person themselves! There have been recent cases of organisations seeking refunds from training providers who failed to deliver the results, based on objectives that were too upbeat and implied a guarantee of succcess.
But returning to the main point, I would ask why the managers are being required to coach their staff. For instance, are sales targets not being met, but the managers have a wealth of expertise and skills that could be passed on to their staff through coaching? In which case, then one measure would be the improvement in sales revenue per employee.
In this example, you should also take into account the cost of sending the staff on sales training courses and hopefully show that it would be cheaper to invest in coaching training for the managers, rather than send the sales teams away for more training.
So to generalise…what are the desired results from managers coaching their staff and what would it cost to achieve these results in any other way?
Speak to Mark Doughty
A friend of mine Mark had to prove the same to his Board while working in UUnet, Im sure he could help you with this , call him on 07764 181060 and tell him I introduced you.
Hope this helps
I know a company who has done this
and introduced a managers as coach throughut Reuters. It has been extremely successful and I am sure they would be happy to talk to you about how they introduced it and the results they achieved for the client.
Contact me on [email protected] for details of how to contact them.