The impact of measuring coaching impact

Every professional coach knows that coaching makes a difference. Most obviously, there's plenty of talk about those "Aha!" moments that occur when a coachee taps into metacognition to change their worldview.

As a general rule, coaching has an impact on the coachee, and if the coaching is related to someone's role in the workplace, the employer will feel the benefit, whether they notice its connection to coaching or not. But however helpful the coaching might feel, that benefit might not be realised instantly, and even if it is the connection to coaching might not be obvious.

On the surface, a coaching session is just a pleasant conversation that takes the coachee away from their work. No-one's going to deny it's a nice experience, and there are feedback metrics that underline that fact, but that's not the most important impact. Employers aren't obliged to lay on nice experiences for their people, however critical it might be in retaining talent, and there are cheaper options for a nice experience than hiring a coach.

This can be a real problem felt by those with responsibility for coaching within organisations. If that's you, you'll know what it's like. You believe in coaching, and want it to be successful, but have the constant uphill battle with others in the organisation who feel a lot more comfortable investing in activities that can clearly demonstrate the positive difference they're making.

Is it possible to truly measure the impact of coaching?

Measuring the impact of anything in an organisation is easy with processes that are tangible, predictable, repeatable, and linear. Spending money on a social media advertising campaign is remarkably easy to justify in some businesses, because it acts like a tap that can be switched on and off, and turned up and down. In contrast, coaching works on an individual's psychology more than anything. It's intangible, unpredictable, highly personalised, and inexplicably complex.

That's where the magical power of coaching comes from, in some senses.

But that doesn't mean that measuring the impact of coaching is impossible. It just means it needs some thought putting to it.

Purpose-driven metrics

Let's go back to basics with an imaginary organisation. Why are we using coaching here at all? There are lots of good reasons we might want to, like:

• increasing the effectiveness of a leadership development programme
• accelerating the adoption of a new leadership mindset and organisational culture
• supporting individuals in developing the skills and behaviours needed for a promotion

These grand, coaching-programme-wide goals give us a good framework for thinking about what impact we want to see, and should cascade into coachee-specific goals, perhaps through some form of tripartite. Yes, a coach-coachee conversation should have the freedom to go anywhere that makes sense, but if it's happening on the employer's time and the employer's dime, both coach and coachee should be respectful of the important role the employer plays in it.

This approach ought to lead to a conversation about how the coaching objectives could be tracked.

And this is perhaps easier said than done.

An organisation I once worked with had rolled out a global leadership framework that insisted that every meeting should finish with upward feedback. I thought that was a lovely idea, until I started attending meetings and noticed that, culturally, the "upward feedback" was actually just flattery and grovelling by another name. The organisation had this false sense of assurance that they had a feedback culture, when precisely the opposite was true. Team leaders were continually being told how great a job they were doing, even when they weren't.

Clearly thinking through what the intended outcomes of a coaching engagement are (rather than outputs), and which potential metrics might demonstrate those happening, will help to bring clarity around how to measure the impact the coaching is having within the scope of its purpose.

A quick aside.

Some - perhaps many - impacts might not be quantifiable. That's ok. Forcing measurements that don't exist is an exercise in futility. In these instances, subjective reflections on the process from the coachee in a manner that doesn't break confidentiality still offers benefits, and should be encouraged.

Is coaching impact the same thing as coaching ROI?

No. Next question.

Well...

A financial return on investment (ROI) might, in some cases, be a helpful indicator of impact. But (1) it's always going to depend on the intended purpose of the coaching, (2) it's almost always going to be a step removed from the coaching, and (3) at the risk of repeating myself, it's always going to depend on the intended purpose of the coaching.

I've interacted with a lot of organisations around coaching, and I can't think of any that initiated a conversation because they were looking to cut their costs. That doesn't mean coaching doesn't offer a fantastic ROI - it almost certainly does - but other routes tend to offer straighter lines to achieve that objective.

But coaching can achieve more ambitious things at the same time.

Let's use wellbeing as an example. In 2019, the average worker in the UK was off work for 21.6 days for stress, depression, or anxiety. (Note, that was before the anni terribili of 2020 and 2021.) Coaching could be a great prevention for all of those, and that has a clear financial benefit. But the financial benefit of a few fewer sick days surely pales into insignificance when the outcome is a workforce that's more resilient, more proactive, more self-aware, more inclusive, and the list goes on.

ROI is one part of coaching impact, but when we pretend it's the only impact, we pigeonhole it into a corner where other interventions will make a lot more sense. If we want to reduce stress, a mandatory monthly hug with colleagues might be more awkward but is a proven way to reduce stress and is almost certainly cheaper. Coaching makes sense more often than not because its hyperpersonalisation (not the "personalisation" AI algorithms claim) hit multiple, relevant targets simultaneously.

In short, working through complicated calculations for the sake of a spreadsheet will probably end up reducing the perceived impact of coaching rather than demonstrating it, comforting as it might be.

The impact of time on coaching impact

Possibly the most important factor in coaching impact comes when considering the relationship between coaching and time. The conversations happen at a point in time, but their impact might not be felt until much later (I once had a coachee message me two years after our coaching had finished, saying they were only then realising what a big difference it had made!).

With that in mind, part of our thinking around capturing the impact coaching has should be around when to capture it. While "at the end of each session" feels convenient, and "at the end of the coaching engagement" feels like helpful closure, with no time having passed to have observed the impact the expected level is more likely to be zero than anything else. A more elegant solution ought to incorporate more mature thinking around the purpose discussed above.

Whenever I begin to think about this, I can't help feeling like it's something to put in the too-hard box . But I have to keep returning to what I know: coaching does make an impact, a big one, and finding the right ways to measure it helps others to discover that too.

Every time the impact of coaching has been studied it's been shown to generate positive results. Trusting that's the case, and finding sensible ways to capture coaching impact, must be worth it.