Ten Trends Driving Organizational Coaching

2. Coaching goes strategic

Recognizing the value of coaching is one thing. Funding it is quite another. Nearly one in five respondents to a 2015 ICF/HCI survey of 300 organizations said that it is “very difficult to find or secure funding for coaching in the organization.”

The biggest mistake that coach evangelists make is to think that the power of coaching will sell itself.

An Organization Development (OD) manager at a Fortune 100 firm spoke for many peers in saying, “Those of us who’ve been trained and transformed by coaching are so passionate about it that we think our bosses will immediately see the benefits. They don’t. We can’t sell coaching by saying how much happier and healthier our employees will be. We need to make the business case.”

NASA learned that lesson long ago.

Coaching was already being used in all 10 NASA centers in the 1990s – albeit in very different ways. Leaders from each center convened at the turn of the 21st century to create a strategic vision for using coaching organization-wide to achieve NASA’s tripartite mission of building great leaders, achieving technical excellence, and creating an effective organization. Each center appointed a coaching manager to bring NASA’s coaching initiatives into alignment and regularly share best practices. Today, internal and external coaches provide a full spectrum of integrated coaching services to support NASA’s key strategic goals.

Strategic thinking, plus dogged efforts, also led to coaching success at a leading tech firm. Says an OD manager there, “The first time I pitched a pilot program for coaching, it was based on passion. I received a polite turn-down. The next time,” she said, “I linked internal coaching to an employee insight survey showing that for a majority of employees, career development is a critically important area that we don’t do well.” Now an internal coaching program tied to improving that metric is in the pilot stage.