Measuring the Effectiveness of Leadership Coaching
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Some of you will have had significant experience with leadership coaching while for some of you it is a relatively new concept. And yet, as leaders within your organisations, you will no doubt be interested in three things:
- How effective is coaching as a leadership development intervention?
- What tangible and intangible benefits are possible?
- How can my organisation maximise the possible impact of coaching and achieve effective leadership interventions?
In short how can measuring be done ensure that your coaching interventions represent real value for money, delivering significant improvements in leadership effectiveness? Research, and our client’s experience, indicates there are a number of significant measurable benefits possible from coaching, and certain important factors in determining the effectiveness of leadership coaching.
A common model for measuring effectiveness of leadership coaching programmes (the “Kirkpatrick Model”) considers four areas of criteria or impact. –
- Reaction to the programme and planned action – what was the participants’’ reaction or opinion
- Learning – did the participants acquire the competencies outlined in the programme?
- Behavioural change – did the participants do things differently as a result of the programme?
- Business results – did tangible or intangible business results occur because of the intervention.
An additional level of criteria in sometimes added namely:
- Return on Investment How does the monetary value of the results relate to the cost of the initiative?
Whenever you are considering appointing a leadership coach, ask them how they are measuring the effectiveness of their coaching intervention.
To learn more about the stepshift approach to measuring coaching effectiveness go to executive coaching or return to the blog categories page.