Coaching – the measure of success
Coaching has been growing in popularity for the last few years . A while back when I originally made a coaching website I had lots of enquiries with no effort .
Nowadays the market is bustling with coaches everywhere , especially life coaches . I’ve even been to a party where lots of guests there were life coaches .
Life coaching training standards contrast tremendously and frequently are short – sometimes only a few hours , even home study where people never interact with someone else (which sounds mad – being a coach is all about one to one interaction !).
In some businesses the idiom ‘life coach’ is regarded very lowly and even with contempt ! Performance coaching and working with executives requires a good accomplishment base on the part of the coach . Some advanced coaching may even need specific knowledge in the field being coached , although many people get told specific knowledge is not important in coaching .
Coaching in busness is very much about results and organisations usually require that there is some way of measuring the results to know whether the coaching works .
Organisations often want to know the hard benefits of coaching – such as increased profits , lowered absence from work or any other benefits which can be objectively measured . Coaching often delivers super useful soft benefits which can be difficult to quantify , such as job satisfaction , better motivation , and greater leadership .
Hard and soft benefits are both valuable , however most organisations focus quantifiable results . Many times the soft benefits are even more beneficial , however because they are more difficult to measure are sometimes ignored .
Hard benefits can more easily be objectively measured
How do you know what to measure ? First the purpose for a coaching intervention must be clearly defined . A large legal organisation I helped out wanted to increase the new business brought in by partners in the organisation, when the partners in the past never had to sell and didn’t feel comfortable doing this. The amount of new business could be measured over a period of time.
It is easy to measure profits over a period.
Soft benefits can be more difficult to measure because they are not usually measurable with external data , but are often based on internal changes , such as increased morale , enjoyment and confidence , which may be measured by interviews, questionnaires and case studies . Such results can make all the difference in an organisation influence performance, however are difficult to objectively measure .
So to define usefully the success and changes of coaching interventions, first imagine the outcome and then this will help you design the methodology .
Tom MacKay offers NLP Trainings in North London and NLP Coaching Trainings for effective coaching .