Coaching has the power to create and integrate sustainable change through people growth and development, and in doing so, make a huge difference to both individuals and organisations. HR Magazine spoke with Pamela Richarde, MA, MCC, Senior VP; Cynthia Calluori, PCC, Senior VP; and Michelle Leung, MBA, PCC of Coach U, Inc. to determine how coaching has evolved to become more accessible and to better address talent needs in today’s best organisations.
Today’s talents want their manager to be much more a coach instead of just a traditional ‘boss’—giving them more support with their development and increased focus on their individual strengths. Gallup’s most recent Workplace Insights on drivers of employee engagement highlights that the manager or team lead alone accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement. This is one of many reasons why equipping leaders with coaching skills and developing a coaching culture is currently so high on the agenda for agile organisations.
Evolution of coaching
Both Richarde and Calluori were early adopters of coaching and have witnessed its evolution over time. Calluori noted, “Coaching is now much more mainstream than it was in the early 90s. Today, in the world of coaching, organisations are very thoughtful, considered, and intentional when it comes to integrating coaching in their environments and do so in a much better way than they used to.” She added, “Another big shift has been the evolution of professional standards over time, to such an extent that now when organisations are making coaching decisions, they look for credentialed professional coaches.” Well-trained coaches who are experienced and can bring this professional credibility with them are now much sought after by HR.
In addition to traditional one-on-one coaching sessions, today’s coaching is also being delivered in various ways, including group coaching and team coaching. Richarde explained, “Group coaching is great where a collection of talents is working on a common theme, working with the coach to explore their individual conversations and ideas collectively. In contrast, team coaching is where there is a very specific initiative in the organisation, which often an entire team is responsible for. Here team coaching helps facilitate movement, productivity, communication and ensuring timelines are taken care of.”
On team coaching, Calluori said, “When we engage in team coaching, we support the team to engage around a shared purpose, with full a 360° view of stakeholders. So it’s a group of people but is still very much aligned to a corporate initiative, mandate or change strategy. So there’s a shared purpose, and a key function of team coaching is to support the team in aligning around that purpose.” Richarde highlighted the popularity of team coaching, “Team coaching has now become so mainstream for organisations that the International Coaching Federation (ICF) has now created core competencies for this.”
Coach certification
There are three levels of certification credentials laid out by the ICF:
- Associate Certified Coach (ACC)
- Professional Certified Coach (PCC)
- Master Certified Coach (MCC)
To earn one of these credentials, coaches have to undergo a rigorous training programme that involves:
- Completing coach-specific training that meets ICF’s standards to maximise effectiveness.
- Achieving a designated number of coaching experience and training hours that varies depending on which credential is pursued.
- Partnering with a Mentor Coach.
- Demonstrating appropriate understanding and mastery of ICF’s definition of coaching, Code of Ethics and Core Competencies.
Calluori explained, “Each level of this credentialing has a set of criteria associated with it—predominantly set around the number of specific coach training hours a coach completes in an accredited programme, the number of mentor coaching hours they received, and the number of practical coaching hours that they have logged and accumulated. This is different for each level; even at the ACC level, coaches require a minimum of 60+ hours of training, 10 hours of mentoring, and 100 practical coaching hours.”
There are a number of accredited coach training schools, each offering coach training in different modalities, so the time span for the coach training element can vary significantly. In many programmes, learners get to design their own study path and intensity of training. Calluori noted, “In Coach U, learners can choose to do their initial training in a live intensive workshop and get the bulk of the training done within six days, or they can choose to do the same training in a self-paced programme that might run for up to 15 months. And that would be for the first-level 60+ training hours for the ACC competency; they then have to accumulate their mentor coaching time and practical coaching hours. So the timespan varies a lot, and it’s not just a weekend thing to become a certified coach.”
In-house or external coaches
The decision for HR to go with in-house or external coaches depends on the initiatives in their own organisation, what their goals are, and what they are looking to achieve. Richarde noted, “Often organisations use both methods. They’ll start with a two-day Leader-as-Coach programme led by external coaches, where managers and leaders get a sense of what a coaching approach is. This is often a lightbulb moment for them, and then they want to take more training to become internal coaches. Later as they learn the efficacy of coaching concerning work and the metrics around its measurement, organisations often then bring in external coaches again to coach senior executives. It’s good to coach top-tier executives externally, as they can be completely transparent, with a sense of trust and safety, that they might not get with an internal coach.”
Calluori said, “Often coaches find themselves putting on a consultant hat from the perspective of supporting organisations to develop a coaching culture, helping them to link their initiatives. This might manifest as coaching and developing leaders, creating internal competencies, leveraging external coaches, or shifting systems and processes in the organisation.” She added, “One of a coach’s key goals is to support HR and L&D in-house professionals to become self-sufficient and strongly aligned with their internal organisational culture. They also want to empower them so they can align the systems and processes, and values of the organisation in such a way that it argues for coaching to be successful. It’s not good enough just to train leaders or just to bring in external coaches; HR has to really look at their organisation, how they structure the initiative overall, and how they align systems and processes in such a way that they support an ever-evolving coaching culture.”
Richarde echoed these sentiments and added, “This kind of method creates the sustainability of the change internally in an organisation, and enough so that great coaches can coach themselves out of a job.”
With everything going on globally right now, effective change management and sustainable change have become essential parts of the HR arsenal. Calluori explained, “As we’ve gone through so much change recently, some of that change is going to stay. Subsequently, there’s careful management required around that change as companies return to whatever’s ‘normal’ along with ongoing change management. So there’s a very real role for coaches in this entire change management process because it supports engagement, employee engagement and what has to happen next.”
Measuring coaching effectiveness
The importance of quantifying the effectiveness of coaching interventions has not escaped HR, with CFOs often demanding hard evidence of the ROI of L&D and coaching initiatives to justify the budget spend required. Calluori advised, “HR should try and assess coaching ROI on two main levels: one-on-one effectiveness, where a coach and coachee come together to gauge what’s working in the coaching, but also in terms of organisational return on investment for each coaching initiative. At the coach/coachee level in a leadership coaching context, our model has us establish measurable goals and objectives at the beginning of the coaching assignment. To do so, we support the coaches to identify what the objectives of the coaching are and how they can measure whether the coaching goals were accomplished or not.”
On a broader scale, there are several ways to measure the ROI for coaching, and Calluori explained the process, “Firstly we support the company in identifying key business goals that the coaching initiative is intended to impact, then look at how the company knows that they have been impacted and how they will measure that impact. Then we analyse how much revenue or financial impact is generated from the initiative and the cost of the initiative.” She also referenced two books; the first, Coaching that Counts: Harnessing the Power of Leadership Coaching to Deliver Strategic Value, authored by Dianna Anderson and Merrill Anderson, puts forth a robust model to help HR measure the ROI of leadership coaching sessions. The second is Measuring the Success of Coaching A Step-to-Step Guide for Measuring Impact and Calculating ROI by Patricia Pulliam Phillips, Jack Phillips, and Lisa Ann Edwards.
This requires coaches and HR to identify high-leverage points in the organisation, which will bring maximum return for minimum effort. Calluori illustrated, “If you’ve identified a part of the organisation that could shift towards a new way of working and could be up and running more effectively tomorrow, then that’s an example of a high leverage point. If they have a leadership team open to coaching, then it’s relatively easy to implement coaching and get the ball rolling. This can become a pivotal element in effecting organisational change.” She added, “It’s not a prescriptive process; coaches are rather going to support organisations by asking the right questions and shining the light for them to uncover what’s their best path and might also share useful resources.”
Richarde affirmed, “What’s important is getting the right kind of information from the organisation to see what that high leverage place will be for them in the long run. Coaches don’t have a silver bullet, but they do have the tools and skills to help organisations figure out what’s going to support them best.”
Coaching brings multiple ROIs
The 2019 Building Strong Coaching Cultures for the Future, published by The Human Capital Institute (HCI) and the International Coaching Federation (ICF), highlights the multiple benefits that coaching brings organisations even within a relatively short period (see below).
Michelle Leung, MBA, PCC, of Coach U, Inc. recalled her previous work with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), “I have personally witnessed coaching development and penetration into the organisation globally. During my time as a brand marketer for GSK, they provided executive coaching and bite-sized coaching training for me. Then they started to develop their in-house coach programme to provide more accessible coaching to employees with many of the inhouse coaches obtaining ICF credentials through an accredited coaching training programme.”
GSK’s coaching initiative has global presence throughout the organisation, being available to all employees at every level. Since its initial implementation in 2010, coaching has gained strong support from leadership, including GSK’s senior executive team and has facilitated USD 66 million ROI. In recognition of GSK’s robust global coaching initiative, the ICF awarded them the 2016 ICF International Prism Award. This Award bears testament to the highest standard of excellence in GSK’s coaching programmes that yielded discernible, measurable positive impacts, addressed critical strategic goals and helped shape the organisational culture as a whole.
Richarde noted, “Coaching is all about creating measurables from the very beginning, and the impact on the business results is very tangible. In addition, effective coaching can yield multiple benefits—enhancing performance and effectiveness, employee engagement, communication skills, wellness, retention and succession planning.”
Coaching is absolutely a two-way street...there's significant personal growth and evolution that enables the coach to be really 'present' to another person and focus on their priorities, rather than what you think they should do.
Pamela Richarde, MA, MCC, Senior VP, Coach U,Inc
Two-way street
It is not just coaches who get a lot out of great coaching; the coaches themselves also gain a lot from the process. Richarde noted, “Coaching is absolutely a two-way street, and is so in various ways. Firstly, all coaches must learn exactly what ‘coaching’ means. As a part of that process, if you’re on a really good coach training programme, there’s significant personal growth and evolution that enables the coach to be really ‘present’ to another person and focus on their priorities, rather than what you think they should do. You effectively get yourself ‘out of the way’ to help someone else. So on multiple levels, coaching helps both the coach and the coachee by working in partnership.”
The 2019 Building Strong Coaching Cultures for the Future, highlights the importance of managers and leaders in the success of coaching programmes, with 83% of organisations surveyed expecting to leverage managers to help drive a coaching culture in the next five years (see below).
Future of coaching
Not prescriptive and multifaceted, with elements of both group and team coaching complementing one-on-one interventions, coaching has already significantly evolved since the 90s. Richarde summarised the future of coaching, “I believe that coaching will continue to expand in supporting organisational development and enhancing leadership development. This means coaching can change the world, one organisation at a time. We want leaders to thrive in a VUCA world, and so coaching is becoming the culture of the world. It’s already been doing so—and will continue to do so—helping organisations to integrate better and create safe, sustainable change that contributes to the wellbeing of the planet.”
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
