When coaching grows up

Over the past several years I've had the privilege of seeing coaching strategies and approaches across more organisations than I can remember. Name almost any sector or size of organisation and I tend to have a dull story to tell about it. I've taken my observations from those experiences and drawn on the capability maturity model to produce something I think coaching leaders in organisations might find helpful.

I originally wrote about this in How to Thrive as a Coach in a Digital World , and developed it for the latest revision of SAGE's The Complete Handbook of Coaching. I thought I'd summarise it here to see how people feel it might help in thinking through how to mature the approach to coaching in their organisation. I'd love to hear how you might use it - and how we might work together to increase the visibility and impact of coaching in your own context!

It's a five-stage model, leading to the utopia of Level 5 - we'll get there.

Level 1: Ad hoc

This is the most basic level, in which coaching has barely been introduced to an organisation. Coaching happens in pockets, inconsistently. There's no strategy to increase its use, just isolated instinctive reactions to individual needs.

For example, someone with high potential emerges. A leader who's benefited from coaching in the past suggests it might be a good idea, so brings in the coach they worked with.

This isn't bad, it's just not mature. If an organisation wants to get more out of coaching, it needs to move onto Level 2.

Level 2: Repeatable

At this level, someone takes responsibility for coaching. Rather than anyone initiating coaching purely based on their own knowledge, the organisation now formally holds that knowledge through this individual. They know how coaching "ought" to work (based on their experience), and they're personally connected to some coaches they trust.

In practice, this tends to look like the individual becoming a bottleneck for coaching. It's good becasue there's now consistency, but it's not very sustainable. If they leave, coaching leaves with them. And the level of oversight will be low. A well-organised individual in this sort of role might track matches on a spreadsheet, but being able to put one's finger on how much coaching is actually happening is a different question.

Level 3: Defined

This is the level at which things get serious. The indvidual manages to get down on paper a standard set of processes based on industry good practice, sayng how many coaching sessions ought to happen in an engagement and who the approved coaches are. There might even be the use of a coaching management platform in there.

This level can find itself at odds with people naturally drawn to coaching, because the sort of person who moves towards coaching has often moved away from administration on purpose! This is the level at which feedback can start to be gathered, giving a level of insight into what benefits coaching is bringing to the individuals receiving it.

Level 4: Measurable

We're starting to feel very grown-up indeed by this point. By putting in place a level of governance around the processes outlined above, the organisation's in a place where it can get some real insights into what it's doing. It might start tracking employee engagement and retention data to see what sort of an impact coaching is having.

This is also the point at which coaching starts to step back, questioning what purpose it's intended to serve. Is it effectively an employee perk? Or is it designed to have an impact on leadership effectiveness and productivity? The answer to that question will flow into what coaching procurement and development approaches look like, and generate valuable data for those with responsibility for it.

Level 5: Optimised

And here we are, the utopian dream of organisational coaching. Using the insights from the previous level, we have a fully tailored coaching strategy that acts at an individual and systemic level, expanding into a fully-blown organisational development tool that fundamentally changes mindsets.

The purposes developed at Level 4 are also built upon, introducing virtuous cycles in which insights turn into incremental changes, leading to a continously adapting and improving approach that responds to changes in the environment.

What do you think? Is it possible to achieve Level 5? In a webinar I presented at recently a poll revealed that the majority of attendees self-diagnosed as Level 1: Does that feel accurate and fair to you? How would you develop this to make it more helpful?