Unfortunately, such assessments do only half the job. Most surveys and stakeholder interviews are conducted on the front-end of the coaching and not after the engagement ends. While coaches know what behaviors their clients need to change, they don’t know whether or how they’ve changed in the real world over time. Has the client really taken the promised actions? Are others in the client’s work environment seeing the same changes that the client perceives in him or herself? Are new behaviors sticking when old buttons inevitably get pushed?
Investing in both pre- and post-coaching surveys or interviews can help organizations better assess the longer-term results and real value of their coaching investment.
Performance reviews
While still widely used to evaluate the effectiveness of coaching (by 21% in the Sherpa survey), the annual performance review may be going the way of the dinosaur. “We’re blowing up the old system and finding new ways to engage people in ongoing development and performance conversations,” says one OD manager in a leading management consulting firm.
Scorecards and competitive rankings are being replaced by frequent feedback conversations between boss and employee. The trend is especially strong in sectors like technology and professional services, where the workforce is young (80% of PwC employees are millennials) and turnover is high.
Recognizing millennials’ preference for transparency and collaboration, one global technology manufacturer uses an open forum of peer reviews in which managers calibrate each other’s performance. This type of feedback could be used in the coaching engagement to help the coach and client assess progress and course-correct as the engagement proceeds.
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Rey Carr
December 27, 2016 at 2:34 pm
With the increasing use of polls and surveys by different coaching groups or independent survey firms, it has become more difficult to integrate the different findings into a coherent picture.
Carol Goldsmith integrates the results from different surveys/interviews brilliantly in this article; and for those with a short attention span, she’s even included the top 10 in an executive summary.
Most of the organizations that conduct coaching surveys do not point out the limitations of their instrument or data collection procedures. However, when such surveys are combined, as they are in this article, the resulting data can be more credible.
Carol Goldsmith
January 2, 2017 at 10:33 pm
Thank you for the kind comment, Rey. Glad you found the article to be useful.
Be your best, Carol
Carol Goldsmith, PCC, NLPT
The Discovery Coach