Episode 4: Successful coaching outcomes – how to measure and evaluate investment in coaching services

As an organisation how do you know you are getting the best return on your investment from the coaching interventions you commission? What value can be demonstrated to the organisation and to the individual or team and can it be truly measured?

Joining Karen Smart, head of consultancy at the AoEC, are Wendy Robinson, head of AoEC Ireland and Northern Ireland and principal consultant with Taylor Clarke and Kate Simpson a qualified coach and group human resources director with Global Switch. Looking at coaching from the view of an independent, external coach and from an in-house perspective, listen as they discuss what a good outcome looks like and how it can be effectively evaluated to ensure that it has achieved the desired results.

Enjoy!

You can link with the podcast participants here:

Karen Smart, head of consultancy, AoEC 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-smart-aoec/

Wendy Robinson, head of AoEC Ireland and Northern Ireland

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendyrobinsonexecutivecoach/

Kare Simpson, group human resources director with Global Switch

https://www.linkedin.com/in/connectwithkatesimpson/ 

Transcript

Karen 0:02

Hello everyone, and a warm welcome to the AoEC, the Academy of Executive Coaching. I'm Karen Smart and hosting the podcast today, and I'm delighted to welcome firstly Kate Simpson, who I've known for quite some years now. Kate is an HRD at Global Switch, and we first met together a few years ago and have worked closely together since as a client, the AoEC, firstly with Perrigo and in a number of guises, and we've also trained together. So hello to you, Kate. Kate interjects - Hiya, Karen. Thanks for having me today. Back to Karen - I'm delighted also to welcome Wendy Robinson. Wendy's a colleague at the AoEC. She heads AoEC Ireland and Northern Ireland. And alongside that work, she is also a consultant with Taylor Clarke and an executive coach and coach supervisor. So welcome to you, Wendy.

Wendy 0:58

Oh, lovely to be here. Thanks, Karen.

Karen 1:00

Really, this whole conversation came about through Kate and I chatting some time back about the impact that coaching has in the workplace. And I know, Kate, you're very passionate about the role of coaching and also the benefits of coaching in terms of seeing a return for the investment of time and money. I wonder whether you could just introduce us a little bit to that theme and then perhaps I'll ask you some questions about it.

Kate 1:30

So I remember when you and I first met, we spoke about introducing coaching into the organisation and we were talking about doing it because the organisation was in a real kind of state of change and it was going to go through a massive growth trajectory. And my background at that point was very much grounded in being a HR generalist whose coaching experience was probably very, very limited to what I would now call performance coaching. So, looking at where performance improvement was required and setting very clear, action plans to help someone move from A to B. And I could really clearly understand how that was measured by an organisation in terms of people seeing value for that type of coaching. And I was really curious when I met you about actually how do we use coaching to really help businesses go through that, kind of growth change journey. How do you measure the return on investment of the cost? Because I remember you and I having lots of conversations around cost and it's not even just a big cost investment, but it's also a big time investment. And from there I became really curious really about how do you go on that journey? How do you take an organisation on the journey of embedding coaching into the organisation to make a real difference to the culture? And how do you get to the point where you can justify the cost and ground it in measures of a return? And I use that word measures of return really carefully because I don't always like return on investment because that's kind of like A equals B equals six. Sometimes the measures of return are slightly less tangible, and you have to get organisations comfortable with understanding what return they're going to get in this investment, moving them away from some of the harder facts and figures that they're used to. And that's where I got interested and curious, and that's why I've also taken myself on a coaching journey because it's expanded how I operate within that space as well.

Karen 3:29

That's that's great. And if you can cast your mind back to those days, and you wanted to move from performance coaching to a broader context. What was your starting point?

Kate 3:40

Gosh, if I'm being really honest with myself, I probably didn't make that transition properly until I finished my practitioner programme with the AoEC. And it was only probably at that point that I realised that coaching was multifaceted and it wasn't just about enabling people to move from one space to another space in terms of making an improvement, as an example. I started to realise that coaching could have a massive benefit on how people showed up on a day-to-day, how in aware they were in terms of the impact they had, and that kind of multi-system dimension element that really added value to the organisation. And so that's probably where my journey really started, if I'm being really honest with myself in terms of understanding how beneficial coaching can be to an organisation. Thanks for that, because there'll be someone somewhere out there who's at that point that you were at when we first met. You know, and my background was HR generalist, so , I'd been taught coaching for improvement. So the Grow model, as an example, was something that's really ingrained into me from my Tesco and my Asda days, where that was the model that we used for giving people performance coaching. And again, coaching was dressed up, it was a kind of really nice polished way of talking about actually just giving someone some feedback. This is where you are, this is the journey you need to go on. How might we get there together? Well, this is what you need to do, and this is how I'm going to measure you, right? Okay, it was a very tactical, step-by-step process, and that's not right or wrong because that's appropriate for some environments. But as you move out of that environment into a more kind of corporate environment with different types of individuals, you realise that actually coaching has a different meaning and the way in which you measure the benefits of coaching is different.

Karen 5:35

Thanks, Kate. I'd like to bring Wendy in now, if I may, because I guess that you're coming at this from the perspective of serving clients. So it would be really good to get your insight into what you've seen in terms of the impact that your work has had for the clients that you're working for. And that might be individuals or or it might be at the company level.

Wendy 5:57

Yeah, so really interesting to listen to to Kate there. And Kate was making the distinction around return on investment and it might be measures of return. So I'm sort of very much I think in that place. And you know, as I look back on the ways in which we've evaluated the impact of coaching and the coaches we've provided into organisations, I'm really struck by, oh goodness, it's so, in a way, there's so many different ways that we can go after those measures. And it's so important at the outset to have the conversation almost like to roll up our slaves, us as the external coaching provider, and with the likes of Kate within the organisation, and for us to say, what is it we're actually trying to achieve here? What is the kind of end point that we would love to get to, and then how will we measure that? So sometimes we don't get the luxury of that conversation. So we work across the public sector and the private sector and the not-for-profit, and within the procurement kind of system for public sector, things are often already established and led out, and therefore the evaluation system would be determined even before we're kind of contracted to come on board as a team of coaches. So it really varies, but I mean, the ideal for us, I guess, is that we do get to talk to the likes of Kate and we get to say, you know, tell us really what is this about? What does the organisation need? What are the drivers for the change that we're trying to support with coaching? What are the inhibitors and what are meaningful measures? So I come from an occupational psychology background. Occupational psychologists love measuring things, they love stats, they love creating questionnaires and doing averages and means and medians and all of that kind of thing. And sometimes that's a good approach for evaluating coaching. But I kind of, I don't know, the longer I go on, the longer I see that often there can be changes when leaders are coached, there can be changes that are hard to put a real scientific measurement against. And I think that really fascinates me. But where that happens, there's a real within the organisation, there will be people saying that person has changed. And almost sometimes that's the proof of the pudding, and that's what's important within the organisation.

Karen 8:19

So if you were a hard-nosed finance director, for example, within the procurement setting, what would that mean, do you think, then, Wendy?

Wendy 8:30

Well, actually, you know, I train a lot of coaches and we talk a lot about this, and I love it when on the coach training courses we have people from different disciplines training as a coach, sometimes finance folks, sometimes kind of quite senior project management folk who carry a lot of responsibility for organisational change within huge organisations. And we sometimes have this conversation, and some of them will actually say, you know, the hard-nosed finance person knows that you cannot put financial figures against the return on investment of executive coaching. So I think as the LD community, as an OD community, that is the holy grail, isn't it? That we could put financial measures against it really cleanly. And I absolutely we can to some extent. And we and I love discovering how we can do that better. But there is a counter-argument that says, actually, can we really do that? Can we really put hard financial measures against people's behavioural change?

Karen 9:25

So I'm as you listen to that, Kate, I wonder what comes up for you because I suspect that you might have a different perspective.

Kate 9:32

Kind of slightly. So I think from a return on investment, when I think about what I've done in the future, and if we just use Perrigo as the example, we successfully designed, delivered, and managed a leadership development programme over the four or five years that it was running. And we had to have clear ROI or measures of success, I think is what we called it, not ROI, measures of success. And we had to have some really clear hard data points that we could use to be able to validate how successful the programme was. And then we obviously recognised and we sold in the more softer kind of measures of success that were in existence. So not that different to Wendy. We contracted with the organisation, we talked about measures of success, we had some hard data points and some soft data points, and we used a number of different methodology or tools in order to be able to measure those different factors that the organisation had contracted on that were the measures of success. So, for example, we used questionnaires, so we talked about customer satisfaction, how did the coachee find the programme? But also we asked the sponsors some questions and got them to give us some data that was hard data in terms of had they seen it. But again, you can question or challenge that. We used how many people were promoted as a result of attending the programme. You know, what was the retention, the attrition rate at the beginning of the programme in the department that the person led in at the end of the programme? Did they have an issue with attrition? Did the programme help? There was also we had an employee engagement survey. How engaged were the employees in that business area at the beginning of the programme? Was there a difference at the end of the programme? Was there a difference for the organisation at the beginning of the programme and at the end of the programme? Because we were trying to find some data points that we would be able to use to not just justify the cost of the programme, but to also celebrate the successes of the programme. And you can use references and you can get people to do quotes and you can get the nice accolades about Fred's really stepped up and has got great self-confidence now when they're presenting in front of groups. That's great data, but if you can find some alternative data to go alongside that that also helps you justify the programme, that is also, a really great way of measuring the success or measuring the value of the programme or the intervention that's been put into place. And I think that's for me the mindset, Karen. You know, we we talk about return on investment, but for me it's about measuring the success of the intervention. That's my growth, my personal growth. If you'd asked me seven years ago, we probably would have sat there and I would have said, return on investment, okay, so it's going to cost this much, and how am I going to know it's worked and you know, all of that kind of stuff. Whereas now it's what's the measures of success? And I've learned in my internal contracting, because similar to Wendy, I have to contract internally with stakeholders if I'm going to do any of this. What are the key drivers for them? And therefore, what are the measures that we're going to measure the success of the programme or the intervention against? Would you agree, Wendy?

Wendy 12:34

Absolutely. And there's something you're talking about that I absolutely resonate with, and it's around, and I call it in my words, I call it what is the currency of evaluation in this organisation, in this culture, and the currency is different in different organisations and different cultures. So if I give you a couple of examples, so a public sector example, a Whitehall government department, we were doing some leadership development and coaching with them a few years ago. And we did a sort of questionnaire and interview evaluation around the value which the post-leadership development coaching, what value did that add and what impact did it have? So folk on the leadership training were able to avail of three follow-up coaching sessions one-to-one with one of the facilitators. And the government department, after a couple of years, asked, would we evaluate that coaching to see did it add any value? And I'll never forget one of the examples that came up when I was doing the telephone interviews, kind of a researcher hat on, and I was digging, sort of digging for examples. So I've that's as an aside, when we do evaluations with folk in organisations, they often find it quite hard to pinpoint the actual impact of say coaching, as we're talking about in this instance, it could be a leadership programme or whatever. And so they might say, I loved the programme, I loved the coaching, I got on great with my coach, we had such inspiring conversations, and I was able to bring about changes in my team, for example. But saying what those changes were and sort of almost like putting a measure of success to them, like could you quantify it in some way? Like, has the team produced X product quicker or has the morale of the team gone up? And how do you know that? So, my researcher hat on talking to somebody in this government department, and he was very adamant that the coaching had really been impactful for him and his day job. And the example he gave was he said, through learning to have better conversations with the person he managed, which he learned on the programme and then had reinforced through the coaching, he said, if I hadn't started doing better one-to-one conversations with that person I manage, there would have been a bit of a disaster in relationships with Buckingham Palace. And so there would have been a royal household faux pas. And he said, to us, that is worth a million, do you know? So that was a public sector measure of success. And then we work a lot with the oil and gas sector, with Taylor Clarke being based in Scotland, and we were providing coaching within that. And one of the guys was able to give such a clear example, and he was able to do the almost the direct calculation of what is the return on investment of him having had a coaching conversation and gone away and done something different, which in his case was something around putting a load of stuff on a spreadsheet or automating something in order to catch things falling between the cracks. And he was without doubt able to say, I have saved my company half a million, half a million pounds. You know, so I often hold those as two extremes, public and private. It's different currencies as to what is important.

Karen 15:58

I think that backs up some of the data that that we see elsewhere. I know one of the reports that there's not a lot of published data actually on ROI in coaching. But one of the reports that I was looking at with my colleagues from Metro Global case study showed the return on investment of 529%. Now that's quite a conclusive answer. There's that thing about the decision that isn't taken or levels of trust in increasing or numbers of fines reducing. Some of those things are absolutely tangible outcomes from coaching. But I guess it's about that mindset of thinking where you want to get to, start setting out with the end point in mind. And one of the things I think that I really valued in working with you, Kate, when you were at Perrigo was the way that everything that we did was integrated into the systems and procedures that you already have. So it wasn't about kind of shoehorning coaching in as a separate entity. It was, how can we really think about how we develop people, recruit people, retain people, engage people, and actually bring coaching into the parameters that you're already using.

Kate 17:23

The real success of it was that actually it was grounded in three phases, wasn't it, Karen? It was the we recognised that in order to be able to really make an impact on the organisation, the individual had to get better insight into themselves, and coaching enabled that. They then had to be able to make an impact on others. Hey, guess what? Coaching really helps with that as well. And they had to be able to, you know, deliver business results. Well, guess what? Coaching helps with that as well. So coaching became really integral. It was just, as you said, grounded into the core of the programme, but it was also weaved in with some other really great tools that and that enabled coaching probably to have a bigger impact, probably with some individuals. So at the beginning of each of those leadership development programmes, everybody went for a 360 degrees feedback survey. So they were getting some individual data, they were understanding themselves better based on what other people thought of them, all different varying levels of the organisation. And then they had a debrief, with one of the internal coaches to talk about well, what did that what did that report mean to them? What as a result of that information, what were they going to focus on through their coaching journey as part of the programme? And then there were meetings within that 14-month programme to re-evaluate and touch base, both with an internal coach and with their external coach. So coaching was absolutely weaved in. And then we re-ran the 3 60-degree feedback at the end of the programme to be able to measure, because it was a really good data point. We're able to measure, you know, what improvements would be made in what areas, and how did that meet with the personal development plan that individual would come up with? So, even though I joke and I say the developmental, the performance-driven coaching is where I started, and that's what got me interested in coaching. For me, there's some really kind of core parts of that coaching methodology that really nicely go into things like developmental or transformation coaching, because I really believe, rightly or wrongly, that to be able to measure the success of a coaching programme, whoever you're working with, the sponsor and the coaching, needs to be really clear on what are we trying to achieve as part of this process, and it can change, it doesn't have to be the same at the end as it was in the beginning, but you do need to be able to talk about that journey to be able to measure the success of the programme. And that takes a lot of time and investment and energy, but it's really, really valuable. And I was just reflecting on what you said, Wendy, about some of the measures as well, based on your two examples. And I was thinking, how funny is it that as an HR professional, the more you go into different environments and different businesses, right, you start to see different data points that could be measures of success. And so I was thinking about the Perrigo programme and the fact that you know a third of the population were promoted. And I'm thinking, I never once stopped to think about the cost saving of promoting those individuals into more senior roles. And I never laid it out as a cost saving in terms of recruitment costs, you know, training, and then a third of them transitioned into expanded roles, they took on greater responsibility. So I'm sitting here now kicking myself thinking, I should have done that as a data point. Being able to prove that the programme paid for itself.

Karen 20:38

I think that's really interesting, and it touches on something that you said earlier, which I don't always think we're very good at, which is also about celebrating success. So not only did you actually achieve some of the outcomes that you wanted, or you know, even all of the outcomes, or in some cases surpassed the outcomes you wanted. What would you say to someone who's setting an outcome or a goal for coaching about how to celebrate those achievements when they come? What advice would you give?

Kate 21:09

I think it for me this is where the core coaching principles come into play. So contracting, and when do you do it in your day-to-job in a in a probably different way to how I do it internally as a coach? So when I'm working internally, I approach it slightly differently. So if I'm doing some external work. But the principles remain the same, which is about soliciting and understanding from the organisation what are the key drivers and what are the things that culturally are working or not working, and therefore, how could an intervention such as coaching make a difference? And I think when we ran the first cohort of the programme, Karen, we were clear on some of the measures of success. But I definitely think by the time we got to the third rotation of the programme and we'd tweaked it and played with it, we were much better at being able to articulate what those measures of success were. And if I think about the difference from year one to year three, year one was very much about engagement with the senior leadership team and the CEO as the key stakeholders. By the time we got to year three, engagement was maintaining that engagement with the CEO and the C-suite, but it was also about engaging with the line manager of the participant that was going to go onto the programme. So you ended up with a kind of tri-part conversation, which was C-suite sponsorship, line manager sponsorship, and the coachee, and having those conversations around well, how's my line manager going to help me as part of my programme? What's the commitment they're making? What's my commitment as the coachee to my line manager into the C-suite? And how am I going to get some mentoring from within the C-suite? So we really evolved that. And I think by the time we got to year three, Karen, we'd got all of the C-suite had gone through the practitioner programme with the AoEC so that everybody could talk the same language, albeit they would cope in their own way, which is the joy of coaching.

Karen 23:02

So, Wendy, can I perhaps bring you in at that point?

Wendy 23:06

So, yeah, celebrating success. Yeah, I think that's a great question because we do have the negativity bias, don't we? It's you know, we work with that when we're training coaches, but our brains keep going to what's not right and what's wrong with things and what we should be criticised for or what we could do better. So for coaching clients, achieving the success that they set out to is a wonderful thing. And how do we celebrate that? And I think it does link a lot back to what Kate was talking about in terms of tripartite and other people knowing that this individual was trying to make this this change. And actually, we talk about that a lot at Taylor Clark, that if the, at the very least, the line manager of the person who's being coached is really aware of what that individual is working on in coaching. And is there often every day seeing the coachee, whereas as the external coach, we don't. I often say we it's like we parachute in. We parachute in for an hour and a half, once a month for six months, say. So in many ways, we're definitely not the most important person. The two most important people are the coachee and their line manager working together to bring about the change. For the line manager to spot, or or it could be another sponsor within the organisation, but for somebody to spot that the coachee is behaving differently, that they're speaking more confidently at the exec team meeting, or they heard somebody else comment that so-and-so spoke really well on something, or had got a load of people on board with something, to be hearing that is just is just lovely for the coachee. It is so motivational for them to keep on doing what they're doing in that new direction. And then to counter that if I guess if nobody around about them notices anything different, but they believe they've done something different, but nobody notices it or comments on it. There's no positive reinforcement of it. That can be quite soul destroying.

Karen 25:07

Well, I have to say, the work that I do here at the AoEC, what I know, Kate, last time we were together, we were with Paul from Ambassador Theatre Group. And I guess one of the highlights of my year is that every year he invites me to their graduation process. So they run a number of different learning and development initiatives, and one of them in particular goes on for two years, and at the end of the two years, every person on the programme gets to make a presentation of the impact that the development programme has had for them. And I think that the strongest testimony often comes from their experience of having been coached, and they're powerful personal stories. So I think one of the great returns on investment is in that personal testimony of what's happened for you individually as a person, how you've grown, how you've become more self-aware, how perhaps you're able to publicly speak where beforehand you might not have been able to. Those stories are so powerful and emotive. There isn't an amount of money that could really equate to the emotion, the positive emotion that comes through in some of that testimony. And that in itself is a wonderful way to celebrate, to actually listen to people who've been on a journey and to find out and to learn from them what they've learned about themselves as a result of being on that journey is really powerful.

Kate 26:40

We actually created an alumni. So when you'd gone through year one to year two to year three, you ended up having this bigger cohort of alumni that had gone through the programme. And at the end of each programme, the concluding cohort would have to do a presentation, they'd have to work together to do a presentation around had they thought about the programme at the beginning and what had been the most memorable moment, both individually or as a group as they'd gone through, and they could present it as creatively as they wanted. And the incoming cohort would talk about what they'd heard about the programme and what they were hoping to get out of the programme. And I have to say, that was a massive celebration of success because the learn, as I shared, was about making sure I had real sponsorship at all different levels in the organisation. But then, the celebration was about there being this collective celebration of the people on the programme feeling really supported and really enabled to go on their journey and then standing up and creating energy and engagement throughout the rest of the organisation about the journey they'd been on. You know, it really did create this massive sense of celebration and also competitiveness because each year the videos got more and more creative. But then the celebration was they took the tools they were learning through the programme and they took the learning from previous cohorts. So, they had to keep a learning journal and talk about what they'd been learning through, post each module talk about what they'd learnt. And the reason for that was so they could go back and engage with their line manager. That was primarily the key reason for being able to do that and to celebrate success and ask for help. And it got to the point where the learning was that not everyone did that religiously enough, as an example. But by the time we got to the last year of the programme, they had these big books. I think someone even had an online OneNote book that everyone could share and add in stuff. So it became a really kind of organic and live document. And that for me was a success and it was something to celebrate because they were being innovative, and that was one of the values of the organisation. And you could demonstrate that the programme had an impact. We wanted them to be collaborative. Well, hey, they were being collaborative, they were sharing in the moment using a innovative, you can argue that if one note is or not, but you know, in an innovative way, that what they were learning through the programme and working together towards the end goal of this celebratory presentation that they would have to do towards the end of that programme. And I think all of those things are and were real moments of pride for me because you stand back, you've put all this effort into designing a programme, and then you see it come to fruition and you just want the people through the programme, and you have queues of people wanting to go on to the next programme, and that is also a I think a moment of celebration.

Karen 29:16

I think you're actually talking about belonging. You know, it's a human elemental thing. We all want to belong somewhere, and you belong in your cohort, but you're also belonging in the cohort of cohorts, and the cohort of cohorts belongs in the company. So actually, you're reinforcing a sense of belonging at the organisational level, which is great. Yeah. Wendy, what are you thinking?

Wendy 29:42

Well, I was going back my mind to what you were saying, Karen, about the emotional testimony of people and and how powerful that is. And I totally agree. And I think I guess within when we're evaluating coaching, I think there are two things. One is the hard data points, the things that we could say here, this is a repeat 360. This is pretty scientific, and it's not just self-assessment as to the person saying they've changed, it's those round about them have seen what could be a statistically significant change in behaviour for the better. So we have that hard data, but then you cannot deny the power of somebody's testimony and their passion and their openness around how they've changed. And I think it's about getting whatever blend the organisation needs around those around those two things. And maybe even the hard-nosed finance director is swayed emotionally by the testimony more than he or she is by perhaps a calculation on something that doesn't equate to strict numbers. I don't know.

Karen 30:46

I think that's really good actually. It's about having a mixed set of endpoints and making those endpoints as creative as you can and as demonstrable as you can in a variety of ways. So in a qualitative way as well as in a quantitative way.

Kate 31:03

And I think designing your programme backwards also helps. So, you design it forward, you design it backwards, you work it forward and back because at the end point you do need to be able to validate how successful has the intervention been, right? And so looking at what data points already exist within the organisation or which data points need to be created in order to help you be able to measure that is really, really important. And as someone who doesn't coach as a profession, who does it as part of their job in the business on a day-to-day, I think the balance of having some really hard data points, engagement surveys, retention rates, what are people saying in your exit interview? Put a question in there about do I get leadership and development? Does my line manager give me feedback? Whatever those points are, you can even do it for new joiners six months in. What level of support did my line manager give me as I transitioned into this organisation? You can come up with some data points that are going to make a real difference to the organisation and then measure them over a period of time, and then you have the more softer stuff that's more behavioural related that might be measured in a 360 survey or it might be measured in an engagement survey. You'll come up with those different points of measure, but it can be testimonial as well, Karen. You know, we had this conversation about helping people really think about what data points exist to be able to really encourage the use of coaching in an organisation. And you do have to have those data points because that's how you influence the people that make the decision about whether or not they can spend the money or not. How many training hours do you as a company invest in per person? What's the average benchmark that's out there in the industry? What are your peer group doing, your peer analysis group in terms of coaching? Do we do coaching? I don't know. You know, is there a gap? Being able to have that data in your back pocket to influence the decision about starting the introduction of that intervention is just as important about then agreeing what the measures of success are as you move forward because it paints the whole picture of what I am trying to influence in this organisation and how am I going to measure how successful we are being in the influencing of whatever that point is.

Karen 33:21

And as I listen to you, what's coming up for me is you know, some of the work we've done with AoEC clients is around putting evaluation points in that aren't necessarily specifically about coaching. So, for example, you might have a rating scale where on one side you've got my manager tells me, to my manager listens to me and asks people to rate on that kind of scale. Well, this is about being heard, this isn't necessarily just about being coached, it's about some of the skills that coaching enables and actually thinking about what's going to make a big difference within an individual organisation. So it's going to vary from company to company, I would say.

Kate 34:07

It doesn't, I think the insights around capabilities and behaviours is another important measure, which is where 360 data helps you around that. The perception around qualitative and quantitative can give you some really good indicators. But often or not, when you start to think about coaching, we're talking about insights into people's personalities or traits and how that shows up in the workplace. And that requires an element of feedback to be able to put a stake in the ground, be able to say, well, what's the thing I'm focusing on and what's the measure of success?

Karen 34:38

And I think that that's some, if I think about myself and my own coaching journey, actually improving at giving and receiving feedback is a huge and tangible benefit. And actually that's one of the reasons why I wanted to train as a coach was to become better at giving feedback. And I think I've become much better at balancing the reinforcing celebrating feedback, positive feedback with developmental feedback. And I recognise now that as a person I perhaps was overly rooted in the gap analysis type of feedback rather than working with what's working. So I think actually being better at giving and receiving feedback is a huge benefit as well. I'm just also thinking something that you said, Wendy, earlier, it's kind of not directly rated related to what we're talking about now, but you were talking about the scenario where the outcomes are already decided prior to the proposal process or tendering process. I can imagine that happens quite often, that an outcome is kind of assigned. And my personal preference would be for that to be more consultative, more conversational. But I wonder whether you can offer any insight or advice to anyone out there who finds themselves on the receiving end of a procurement process.

Wendy 36:05

Yeah, and even, as I listen to your question, I'm thinking what would be an example of what I said there and how prescribed are the outcomes. Like one example I'm thinking of reflected in the invitation to tender the extreme pressures on the leaders who the coaching was being procured for extreme pressures, like coming at them every every which way. And these are quite visible leaders in in society. And I suppose you wouldn't argue with any of the outcomes. You know, the outcomes are to provide support for leaders during change, to support them with work-life balance, to enable them to delegate more. And I see it as important to bring on the next layer of talent, the next layer of leadership to make sure those guys are stepping up to the mark. And that can be quite difficult if you're a very competent leader and you're all over it, is to invest some of your time to bring on other people's leadership. So, yes, you wouldn't argue with any of those outcomes, but it does mean that as you, as so I'm a coach on the contract, I'm thinking of. So as I go in as a coach, I've kind of got a huge distance potentially between what the procurement and the powers that be have said, the reasons for wanting the coaching and this human being sitting in front of me, who I'm seeking to build rapport and build trust with. But maybe a lot of times it's surprising how the two do then meet as we get going and we get into it. And so it's an interesting, I don't know if it's a dilemma, but it's an interesting situation for coaches, isn't it, where we are procured onto contracts and we turn up to see the human being in front of us and we maybe have a few shoulds, as to what should be coached, what should be the outcome, and we've got to sit with that, and we've got to see what's possible without owning that agenda, because the worst thing always is if the coach owns the agenda, even subtly. But I mean, in that case, in that example, I'm happy to say that there've been a couple of quite extensive external evaluations of that coaching, and the coaches that these public leaders are in focus groups, etc., talking to actually the benefits that the procurers wanted.

Karen 38:28

And you know, there's a sort of vague language thing coming up as I listen to you. Often goals are expressed vaguely. So it's how can we as consultants or coaches actually take that vague language and put it into something meaningful for the client? I guess what's coming to mind is what will you notice is different about what whatever the topic is. What will you notice at the end about your leadership style that's different or whatever the goal is? And we see that often within the start of a coaching session, when you try to set out within there's a sort of a balance between having a goal and and holding space, and particularly when you're serving an organisation with a sponsor who does have a specific organisational outcome.

Wendy 39:21

Yeah, I think it is the skill of the coach, as you say, to hold the open space and to be pursuing the goal. Like what is it you want to change, what does that look like, or the sessional goal? So what would be different when you walk out the door today, or if our conversation had been really successful today, what would you be leaving with?

Karen 39:39

So I'm wondering for the two of you, what measures you would put in place for behavioural change? And if somebody wanted their leadership to be better, we've talked about 360s. What else might you consider using?

Wendy 39:55

It may or may not be helpful, but I what I was thinking was that's the kind of question I think I would be putting back to the client organisation. Like, what is that going to look like to you or who would see the difference? Who would see the difference and how would you measure it? So, yeah, we could put in questionnaires or we could make hypotheses about what other hard data in the organisation might link with it, but I'd be really keen to know what that difference in leadership looks like to those who want to see the difference in leadership and how they would know when they saw it.

Karen 40:25

And if I think back to your case, Kate, you ran the programme like a cascade, starting with the most senior sponsors and then gradually engaging everyone else. And I guess that doing it that way around probably facilitated the adoption of the programme. And there's a balance, isn't there? Because coaching is based on a coalition of the willing. And so you don't want people to do a thing because the senior leader said so. But on the other hand, when you see the senior leader walking the walk and talking the talk, that somehow inspires you to get involved and roll your sleeves up and have a go yourself.

Kate 41:05

You know, absolutely. And then when they start to see that people within the organisation are positioned to be able to be promoted into a role that perhaps they once thought they might have to recruit externally. So for me, all of this is part of a system, isn't it? So to be sponsored, to go on the programme, often not you've gone through some kind of internal talent assessment and performance potential process. And as a result of that, some intervention is being identified that would help the organisation as a whole. Yeah. So, we want to Kate has potential to be this role in the next 12 months. If we were to accelerate that in the next six months, what would we need to do in order to help that? So what's holding Kate back? And if you're doing proper talent performance reviews, you're going to be talking about what's someone good at and what someone perhaps needs a bit of support and sponsorship on. And that then drives some of that coaching focus as part of that individual's personal development plan. But the bit for me is the organisation holds a responsibility about what does success look like. The individual holds responsibility about what does success look like for them. There needs to be some parity between the two because otherwise the gap means that your two measures of success are going to be hugely different. So you need to find a way when you're contracting to be able to line those up because you're going to be assessing that, and one individual's performance is going to have an impact on the organisation's measure of success within that space. And so it is part of a multi-dimensional layered system where you're not just picking someone random to go on the programme, you're identifying talent in the organisation and you're supporting and sponsoring them not just at one level but at multiple levels within the organisation. So they've got advocates and sponsors to help them on that journey.

Karen 42:53

And actually, you're talking about inside the organisation, but as you talk, I'm really getting a tangible felt sense of the pull factor that actually that you're talking about an organisation that I want to work for, because that's the sort of thing that helps people to be in the top employer rankings. And if you look at Glassdoor and those sorts of things, they're sort of informal but external measures, but people look at those too. And actually having an organisation where people have those sorts of opportunities for support in their development programme, I think is attractive. And those that don't do it will presumably be left behind.

Kate 43:35

And again ultimately, when we talk about return on investment or measures of success, you're you're ultimately talking about what's your brand as an employer. That's it. Why do customers want to engage with you? Why do people want to engage with you? And why do people want to stay with you? You know, maybe that's very simple Kate version, but ultimately that's how I like to think about it, which is you know, you want to have engaged, motivated, enabled, resourceful employees. And you want them to stay in the organisation for as long as is appropriate. And I say appropriate because sometimes people get to the point where they've learned everything they can learn and they need to go on and do something elsewhere. And in Perrigo, we used to call that the alumni of Perrigo. You know, we would with pride, we would be really happy. I mean, we won't want to see people go, but we'd have pride that someone that was alumni of Perrigo went on to another organisation and they're taking on a bigger role and they were doing really well. And we were really happy about that because it was right for them and it meant that they could at some point perhaps come back. It wasn't that the door was shut. That was a celebration. We talked about celebrations. We acknowledged that and we realised that to have a you know zero turnover for our high potential talent was just completely unrealistic and would mean that we were not able to celebrate the actual true successes of the programmes that we were putting into place. You know, so for me, Karen, the return on investment measure of success has to be ultimately what's your brand as an employer? Why do customers want to work for you? Why do people want to engage with you, work with you, and work it backwards from there? If you've got people that are engaged and happy and they're being trained and they're learning and they're being stretched, and I think there's loads of data and research out there, isn't there, that people like to grow and they like to learn. And if they get bored, that's when they get disruptive and they perhaps move on and that causes issues, and it's all this cycle of you know how it all connects together. But when I go into an organisation, as I have done recently, I'm asking those conversations, what's working? What isn't working? What would you like to change? Why do you want to change it? Why would that be important? And I'm holding that state of curiosity so I can start to understand as a brand what are my recommendations of appropriate interventions that we need to be considering because not one size fits all as well. I'd love to take what I had in Perrigo and lift it into another organisation, but that's not appropriate as well. And as an OD expert, I'm not even sure if I like the word expert, maybe that's my own coaching filter that's sticking in, but as someone that likes organisational development and is curious in that space, it wouldn't be appropriate just to shift and lift. It's more appropriate to truly understand what's going on at an organisational level so you can have the biggest impact possible and then celebrate your successes. Because from all of that you get your measures of success.

Karen 46:19

And actually, you've just articulated your own coaching style there. Probably. So I'm noticing that our time is coming to a close, and I'm sure there are things that you want to tell me that I haven't asked you about. So, what are the questions that you're holding that I need to ask you?

Wendy 46:41

There's two things on my mind, Karen. One was the thoughts were going through my head there that ultimately the proof of, I guess, the power, the effectiveness of coaching is the fact that it continues to grow in popularity across all organisations. In fact, not just in the organisational world, but in lots of different worlds outside of the world of work. I remember having a conversation with a colleague nearly, nearly 20 years ago, and we were wondering would this new kind of new thing called coaching, coaching in the workplace, was it just a fad and it would phase out in a couple of years? And here we are, you know, 20 years later, and it continues to grow. And from the various Sherpa surveys, Riddler reports, the predictions are will continue to grow. So that's one thought I was having. And then the other thought was around one of the evaluation methodologies I've used in the past. And just for the listeners in cases of interest, it's called impact evaluation. And it's heavily based on Dr. Robert Brinkerhoff's success case method. And it's all about really almost like going directly for the impact. So rather than perhaps trying to measure lots of things and make links, it's kind of going directly to source to say, okay, what was the impact? Let's get some kind of metric on that. And by acknowledging that, you know, every organisation's different, every culture's different, there'll be perhaps folk for whom coaching is absolutely fantastic and it totally delivers or even delivers more than what was expected. And maybe there's other folk for which coaching may have less impact, but what are the reasons for that? And kind of looking at all of that. So anyway, if folk are interested in that, the impact evaluation, Marguerite Foxon is sort of a world expert on that.

Karen and Kate 48:26

With you, Kate, what should I have asked you? Kate - I think we talked about most things as we've gone through it, Karen. There's not huge amounts that jump to my mind. I think it's just about if you're an external coach coming in as part of a procurement process, just take time to understand the organisation and to understand that commercial hard data is often the language of choice to start with. And you know, as an internal person coaching, I've just learned to hold that state of perpetual curiosity and be flexible in tweaking what the measures of success will be, and also understanding that you know, we talk about engagement, and actually, engagement is about communication, and coaching helps me communicate better. It helps me not always voice an opinion, it helps me hold that state of curiosity. So it's an amazing skill. And the reason that's important as part of this is because actually I'm there to enable and to facilitate. And in order to be able to do that well, I need to ask the right questions and sometimes my own opinion back if I'm trying to get to what are the true measures of success, what can we do differently? And timing's always key. Don't choose a day where the the financial results come out and it's really bad. Make sure you've done something really well that the CEO or the person that holds the purse strings is going to go, Wow, you actually did a really great thing over there. If you need that money, of course you can have it. And you're like, right.

Karen 49:48

Pragmatic answer. I'd really like to thank both of you. It's been a delight to have a conversation with you today. I'm sure you'll have raised lots of questions for our listeners and also, given lots of opportunity for them to reflect on either their own coaching practice or what's going on within an organisation and how to make a start within the organisation or organisational setting to actually develop coaching further. So thank you both very much.