Organisations are increasingly dealing with complex challenges and expecting more from their people. Coaching can unlock potential and create a means for supporting development, improving performance and creating value through innovation.
Establishing a coaching culture might mean professionalising your approach to coaching by upskilling or retraining your existing workforce. Developing coaches across the organisation, be that within a HR or people team, upskilling line managers or retraining senior leaders as fulltime coaches, are typical demand areas with these individuals then becoming your coaching pool.
Yet how do you measure the return on developing these coaches and indeed, coaching across the organisation?
Understanding goals
Strategies can be used during coaching debriefs to ask questions around what individual growth has taken place, and how this can be directly linked to the organisation and its financial impact.
Calculating costs
While it can be tempting for leaders of coaching to come up with a framework for the best metrics for ROI, it’s better to partner with the CFO or an equivalent to understand the best way for the organisation to see costs and benefits.
Common pitfalls
When a coach knows that they are going to be measured on something, they will change their behaviour to achieve that outcome. It is easy to focus on short-term metrics, rather than on the deeper mindset shifts that coaching can bring and benefits for meaningful culture change.
Measuring all coaching outcomes
In practice, it is possible to focus both on the financial ROI and the other outcomes of coaching. The most important trick is to wait until the end of an engagement before measuring the ROI of that particular coaching relationship. That way coaches ’ behaviour isn’t restricted, and the opportunity for genuine feedback and experiencing the results can be achieved.
Grant Thornton’s Coaching Programme
With a focus on developing coaches to empower the workforce, this 12-month programme is funded by the Apprenticeship Levy and delivered by BPP and Grant Thornton. With options for open programmes or bespoke cohorts, we share our coaching methodology to enhance people performance through increasing coaching capabilities, as recently recognised by the EMCC as the 2020 Global Winner for Coaching.
To find out more, please contact us at talentsolutions@uk.gt.com or visit www.grantthornton.co.uk.
