Do you know what the coaches in your organisation are doing? Are you clear about the personal impact of the coaching on people being coached, or the organisational benefits that are being delivered? We often hear statements such as “we are unsure what benefit is being delivered” or even “we have no idea of what the coaches are doing” when we speak to prospective clients. Given that coaching often represents a significant investment by a business, this begs the question:

“what other investment decisions would you make in your business, without a clear business case or return on investment?”

We’d venture to suggest that the answer is likely to be quite succinct – none! Hence why is it acceptable for a significant amount of coaching to be undertaken in an organisation without any real transparency of the benefits being delivered?

The Westwood Coaching approach to Coaching Evaluation

We don’t subscribe to the view that return on investment is a meaningless measure for coaching in an organisational context, or that it is ‘too difficult to evaluate’. When coaches dismiss organisations requests to measure return on investment, they are in effect ignoring the needs of probably their most important stakeholder – the one who is paying them! Organisations will have different levels of maturity, hence the measures that might be used to evaluate coaching will vary from organisation to organisation and do not necessarily have to center around money. In our experience, organisations are generally interested in evaluating the effectiveness of the coaching process and evaluating the impact that the coaching has had on the person being coached and the impact on the organisation.

“Coaching Evaluation is not about being prescriptive about the work coach and coachee will do together in the coaching. This relies upon the skill of the coach. Evaluation is about ensuring that the organisation is getting the required value.”

We have a proprietary consultancy process that enables our clients to get very clear on the quality of their coaching process (including opportunities for improvement) and the benefits that are being realised from any coaching intereventions that are being undertaken  in their organisational context:

  • Discovery – how your coaching work is being undertaken (in-house, external or both). A key principle here is ‘light touch’ which means building upon existing measures you may be using in the organisation (such as appraisals). This phase will identify what do you need to evaluate and how might this be undertaken in your organisation? This includes looking at baselining performance and clarifying need before coaching work commences – in order to be clear that the outcome of a coaching intervention is clearly linked to the coaching.
  • Design – setting out how coaching evaluation will be implemented – creating and documenting each element of the new process.
  • Implement– actioning the design work, creating an evaluation framework that is right for your organisation. This includes the creation of a bespoke dashboard for the client organisation that enables them to have full visibility of the measures that are important to them.
  • Review – at a suitable point after the evaluation framework has been implemented,  reviewing the process against the required outcome to ensure the business is getting the benefits of this evaluation work amongst other things.

If this is a concern in your organisation, or something that you would like to explore, why not get in touch and find out how Westwood Coaching could help you with your evaluation challenges.

More information

If you’d like more information about how Westwood Coaching can assist you with Coaching Evaluation, we’d love to hear from you.

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