Coaching Catch-Up
July 24, 2008
If you think of coaching as something strictly for the unsatisfactory among your workforce, you're behind the times. Turns out even your strongest managers can benefit from it.
By Ted Stephens
Traditionally in the business world, coaching has been seen as a service with a rather limited use. Organizations would hire a coach to support a manager whose performance did not meet expected standards or to get a newly promoted manager up to speed when he or she needed to develop management skills quickly. In line with this limited focus, coaching tended to concentrate on general management skills, interpersonal skills, or communication skills such as public speaking.
This focus on management training, however, captures only a part of the skill-development spectrum that can benefit from coaching. It ignores the need to help a company’s key contributors from the non-management ranks enhance skills they bring to bear on the organization's success. Any company is likely to have employees in critical departments such as sales, IT, research and development (R&D), or legal who do their job well, on the whole, but could do even better with some improvement in a particular skill set&and have maxed out on traditional, one-size-fits-all, course-based learning (classroom or online).
The new approach to coaching takes it beyond the exclusive realm of management training and into a skill, product, or sales orientation. Coaching remains a one-on-one relationship, but it aims at helping key non-managerial white-collar employees, zeroing in on their learning development needs.
Mass Customization
Let's say you have a competent, experienced sales force. Each person has had all the classroom and online training available. The problem, though, is they all have different strengths and weaknesses in their job functions. One could use some help sharpening up his pitch; another needs to learn how to communicate more effectively with her fellow sales team members.
Or let's say there are a couple of people on your IT team whose documentation skills aren't quite up to the required standard, another who needs to brush up on the latest trends in database design, and one or two others who could use some in-depth training in the latest practices and techniques of information architecture.
You can't offer a class that deals with these particular issues in a way that gives each employee the required level of attention. And chances are you also cannot provide an in-house mentor for every such situation that arises, because mentoring requires valuable time as well as mastery of the particular skill or product. Some highly motivated employees might be able to teach themselves what they need to know, but in most cases learning occurs more quickly and effectively under the guidance of a qualified teacher. This is where the coaching industry steps in to fill the breach.
We've seen the trend in manufacturing toward mass customization, and now we're beginning to see something similar in human capital development. The coaching industry is developing methods of surveying and analyzing employees' competencies. Coaching firms are designing customizable curricula, recommending individual development plans for employees, and providing the coaching appropriate to address specific strengths and weaknesses. Such programs can help good employees, whatever their skill sets and their specific needs, advance to the next level and increase their contribution to their companies' bottom line.
Thus coaching is becoming an extension of traditional learning development programs, albeit in a specialized, one-on-one form. If this sounds like an expensive proposition, it is—more expensive, at least, than classroom-based learning and very much more so than online training. But the benefits can significantly outweigh the costs. Remember that we’re not talking about everybody; we're talking about your top contributors, those who already return value to the company and hold the potential for contributing still more. They are people you want to keep on your staff. Chances are they want to be challenged and they want to grow. You can encourage them—and perhaps keep them from seeking their challenges elsewhere—by helping them advance their skills and letting them know you value them.
Setting Goals, Measuring Results
Because the costs of coaching can be high, it's important to see the payoff. For any coaching assignment, you need to develop metrics for determining progress.
Begin by setting no more than three specific learning goals, making sure to confirm the goals with both the employee and the coach. In sales, for example, one obvious metric might be the amount of increase in the dollar value of business an employee brings in as a result of improved skills. Other possible metrics might be opportunities an employee develops, deals closed, new products introduced, or cross-selling opportunities realized.
With IT staff, one example of a metric might be that an employee is required to develop two or three new, workable information architecture plans during the course of the coaching.
Improvement in interpersonal skills is more difficult to quantify. Results might have to do with communication style—does the employee learn to communicate more clearly or become better at sharing information with co-workers? Does he or she provide more support for others? Become better at gaining their trust or handling the stress of collaborative work? Such issues can be more subtle and individualized than the usual topics in general management training such as diversity consciousness, anger management, and inappropriate language.
It's a good idea to track progress on a monthly basis, providing opportunities for regular feedback and encouragement. Constantly re-evaluate the employee's progress, review the metrics, and make sure the coach adjusts the training according to the results of the ongoing evaluation.
Does It Pay?
That is the $64 million question. Sometimes the payoff comes literally in dollar terms. If the members of your sales team each pull in $2 to $3 million of business per year, and spending $6,000 on coaching fees helps one of them to increase her revenues by one percent, the investment more than pays for itself. Similar dollar metrics might apply to, say, equity or commodity traders, but for many other positions such as IT developers or R&D workers the measurable gains may be harder to see directly. Still, if an investment in coaching brings results in terms of new products, more efficient processes, or lower employee turnover, the gains are likely to be worth a lot more than the investment costs.
In most white-collar industries, non-managerial employees are a key human capital component of a company's success. The main payoff for a company that uses coaching effectively is that it enhances the productivity of these crucial contributors, recognizes their value, challenges them, and increases the likelihood of keeping them on the team. Used strategically, coaching can add significant value to your organization.
Ted Stephens is an Associate Principal at Intellilink—a consulting, coaching, and training firm that works with knowledge worker organizations to improve productivity. His areas of expertise include; project management, resource management, and learning and development. He can be reached at info@intellilink.com.
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