Coaching for Development: A Strategic Approach
How to focus coaching where it will have the most impact and measure the success
In today's competitive landscape, one-on-one coaching can be a game-changer for your organization. A coach can help your leaders and team members to make better decisions, boost their productivity, generate more ideas and deliver on business goals.
However, given the investment, two critical questions often arise: Who should receive coaching?, and how do we measure its impact?
We’re sharing guidance on both of those topics today but first, a case study from one of our clients to give you a sense of how these things play out in the real world.
⚡️ Case Study
We were asked to support Ralph, a head-of-product for a large software-as-a-service company. The company had enjoyed a surge of recent success and was expanding rapidly. Ralph was a talented product thinker and was a big part of the reason the product had been so successful. However, scale brings its own set of leadership, communication, strategy and execution challenges and the company recognized that they needed Ralph to grow at the same pace as the organization. As a high-impact individual who was about to build a large team, Ralph represented a good place to focus coaching support.
To establish metrics for the engagement, we worked with Ralph to predict the most prominent opportunities and potential failure cases ahead. As a result of that analysis, we identified three key signals to watch…
The end-to-end throughput of product development across the organization should (at minimum) scale with the number of people in product management.
The overall satisfaction and sentiments of customers should (at minimum) remain at around 85%.
Retention indicators on his team should remain strong (“I understand my role”, “I feel invested in our mission”, “I would recommend working here to a friend”, etc.).
The first two metrics were already being measured by the company while the third required only a modest change to existing employee surveys. In this way, we were able to connect to the existing ‘plumbing’ for measuring success and so use real, meaningful data to help Ralph assess the ROI of the engagement.
After 9 months, meeting with his coach once each month, Ralph had…
added 5 product managers to his team, all of whom were strongly positive on both the culture and the mission
created a 2-year strategic plan that allowed individual teams to run highly autonomously and therefore quickly (end-to-end cycle time on average-sized features improved by 20%)
led the team’s celebration of acquiring their thousandth customer, greatly helped by customer retention rates that were close to 95% over 1 year
Ralph characterized the coaching support during this period as being like a regular push to both think more holistically and to sweat some of the details he’d occasionally lose sight of. Most of all, when he traced the big wins back, they almost always started with a coaching conversation that set him on the right path.
You can read about the coaching experiences of some of our other tech industry clients here
🙋♀️ Who Should Be Eligible For Coaching?
When allocating coaching resources, the goal is to optimize your budget for the greatest impact. We've seen companies have the most success when they prioritize the following groups…
a) High-Impact Individuals:
Senior leaders and executives who influence company direction.
Middle managers responsible for implementing strategic initiatives.
High-potential team members on accelerated career tracks / key individuals with specialized skills.
b) Transition Support:
Newly promoted managers adapting to increased responsibilities.
Team members taking on cross-functional roles or leading new initiatives.
People returning from extended leave or navigating significant changes.
c) Performance Improvement:
People with identified skill gaps but high potential.
Team members struggling with specific aspects of their role.
Individuals working to overcome performance plateaus.
📈 Measuring ROI On Coaching
Quantifying the return on investment for coaching is important for justifying and optimizing your program. It’s also important in enabling individuals to assess the value of the coaching they’re receiving. Measurement in learning and coaching activities is notoriously tricky but we’ve found that a blend of the following approaches helps to pull useful signals out of the noise…
a) Align With Existing Metrics:
Performance Coaching: Link directly to performance review metrics.
Leadership Coaching: Correlate with company engagement survey results, particularly questions about manager effectiveness.
Communication Coaching: Track improvements in presentation feedback, client satisfaction scores, or internal collaboration ratings.
b) Leverage Business-Specific Metrics:
Product / Engineering: Track improvements in cycle-time, defect rates, or user adoption.
HR: Measure improvements in time-to-hire, employee satisfaction scores, or retention rates.
Sales: Monitor changes in deal closure rates, average deal size, or customer retention.
c) Gather Qualitative Data:
Encourage coaching recipients to identify small, measurable improvements between each session.
Track frequency of desired behaviors or successful implementation of new strategies in a ‘success journal’.
Conduct pre- and post-coaching 360-degree feedback reviews.
d) Track Meta-Metrics:
Monitor promotion rates and career progression of coached team members.
Track retention rates and satisfaction scores of coaching recipients.
Assess improvements in team performance under coached managers.
Paying attention to all of these signals is a great way to create a coaching program that not only develops your talent but also demonstrates clear, measurable value to your organization. That said, if you have limited bandwidth, the most important ROI measurements are those that align closely with your organization's strategic goals and existing performance metrics (i.e. A and B).
If you’d like help fostering a high-impact coaching offering in your organization, drop us a line.