Help! I’m responsible for Executive Coaching, is it working?
- 17 hours ago
- 5 min read
A practical guide for HR, Talent and L&D leaders who need to demonstrate the value of executive coaching.
Executive coaching can be one of the most powerful development tools available to a leader, and it’s notoriously known as one of the hardest to measure.
When organisations invest a great deal of money in coaching, it’s reasonable to ask:
Was it worth it?
The challenge is that few leaders walk out of a coaching session and immediately increase profit by 12%, though we have some lovely examples of where coaching has aided profitability and cost saving!
More often though, the impact is seen in conversations, decisions, confidence, relationships and leadership behaviours, as I said notoriously difficult to measure! But, given time, those changes can have a significant impact on an individual, a team and even an entire organisation.
The difficulty is knowing what evidence to look for.
Come closer, I’m going to share some trade secrets with you!
Over the years, I've found that many organisations focus on the wrong things when evaluating coaching. They ask whether people enjoyed it, whether they liked their coach, or whether they would recommend the experience.
A better question is:
What has changed because of the coaching?
1. Satisfaction Is Not Enough
Let's start with the obvious one.
Did the leader find the coaching valuable?
Did they feel supported?
Would they recommend it to a colleague?
These are useful questions and they tell you something about the quality of the experience and I’d be lying if I said they didn’t matter. If that relationship isn’t on the money, then nothing is going to change, but that alone is not enough.
2. Progress Against Objectives
This is where things start to get more interesting.
When the leader and their sponsor align on objectives that enable both the individual leader to develop as well as the organisation, that’s where we start to gain clarity. What matters here? And what matters, can be measured.
What is the leader trying to achieve?
Perhaps they have recently stepped into a larger role.
Perhaps they need to become more strategic.
Perhaps they are struggling to influence at senior level.
Perhaps they need to lead through a significant period of change.
Throughout the coaching journey, it's useful to ask:
What progress has been made?
What has become easier?
What still feels challenging?
How close is the leader to achieving their goals?
This moves the conversation away from opinions and towards evidence.
3. Behaviour Change
For me, this is often where the real value starts to become visible.
The question isn't:
What did the leader learn?
The question is:
What are they doing differently and what is being seen and experienced in the organisation?
I've seen leaders who started coaching because they were avoiding difficult conversations. A few months later, they're tackling issues earlier and with far more confidence.
I've worked with leaders who were spending most of their time firefighting. Over time, they became more strategic, delegated more effectively and created space to think.
I've seen leaders who questioned whether they belonged at the table. Later, sponsors described them as highly credible, influential and more willing to speak up.
Nobody became a different person, but their impact changed and that's what we're looking for.
Visible behavioural change.
4. Organisational Impact
This is the point where coaching stops being purely about the individual.
Because whilst coaching happens one leader at a time, organisations invest in coaching for a reason.
They want stronger leadership.
They want better decision making.
They want future leaders who are ready for bigger roles.
They want teams that perform more effectively.
Some of the areas worth exploring include:
Leadership effectiveness
Decision making and problem solving
Team collaboration
Productivity
Employee engagement
Retention of key talent
Commercial performance
Not every coaching programme will affect all of these areas.
But if coaching is genuinely creating value, there is usually some evidence that its impact extends beyond the individual leader.
5. Return on Investment
This is usually where somebody from Finance joins the conversation and quite rightly.
When organisations invest in leadership development, they want to understand what they are getting back. Let's be realistic. Not every coaching programme will produce a neat spreadsheet showing a precise financial return.
Leadership is rarely that tidy.
However, that doesn't mean we can't identify value.
Some of the strongest examples I've seen include:
A high potential leader successfully stepping into a larger role, saving the organisation external hiring and onboarding time and money
Improved retention of a key individual, keeping their leadership within their organisation, demonstrating the organisation’s values to retain top talent and create inspiration for future leaders
Better stakeholder relationships, leading to improved collaboration, less conflict and a massive cost-saving where 2 previously relationally challenged leaders, began to align and identified how to improve productive and efficiency resulting in lower organisational costs
Faster decision making, this has been seen time and time again, particularly with leaders who begin with strong imposter feelings and as they gain confidence and appropriate boundaries, they start making faster decisions which improved communication and engagement, making actions at the frontline happen to impact the strategic objectives quicker
Sometimes the value is financial, sometimes it isn't visibly financial, but without it the organisation would be worse off, take employee engagement as an example, disengaged employees do cost the organisation financially, even if it’s less visible.
The important question is not whether every benefit can be converted into pounds and pence.
It's whether there is credible evidence that the coaching helped create a better outcome than would otherwise have happened.
Why Multiple Perspectives Matter
One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is relying on a single viewpoint. Leaders are often surprisingly poor judges of their own progress – tempted to cite so many examples of this, but a quick Google will answer that for you.
In fact, some of the most capable leaders are often the hardest on themselves!
They focus on the next challenge, the next skill to develop, the next thing they haven't quite mastered. Meanwhile, everyone around them is noticing how much they've changed.
That's why I believe it's important to gather evidence from more than one perspective.
The Coachee
What progress have they made?
What has changed?
What examples can they give of applying what they've learned?
The Sponsor and their role as ‘eye in the business’
What changes have they observed?
Has the leader become more effective?
More confident?
More strategic?
More influential?
When several parties describe similar progress, confidence in the outcome increases significantly.
Evidence Matters More Than Perfection
Sometimes organisations avoid measuring coaching because they're looking for the perfect answer.
The perfect ROI calculation, perfect metric or perfect report.
But, leadership development doesn't work like that. The goal isn't to reduce coaching to a spreadsheet. The goal is to gather enough credible evidence to answer a simple question:
Has this coaching created measurable value for the leader and the organisation?
If you can clearly demonstrate progress against objectives, behavioural change, leadership growth, organisational impact and examples of value creation, you're already a long way ahead of many organisations.
Five Questions Worth Asking Your Coaching Provider
If you're investing in executive coaching, these questions are worth asking:
How do you measure progress against objectives?
How do you gather evidence of behavioural change?
How do you involve sponsors appropriately?
How do you evaluate organisational impact?
How do you gather examples of business value and ROI?
The answers will tell you more about the quality of the coaching programme than a list of coaching qualifications ever could.
A Simple Executive Coaching Impact Checklist
The next time you review a coaching programme, consider whether you have evidence in the following areas:
Area | Evidence Available? |
Progress against objectives | □ |
Behaviour change | □ |
Leadership effectiveness | □ |
Decision making and problem solving | □ |
Team collaboration and productivity | □ |
Employee engagement and retention | □ |
Organisational impact | □ |
Examples of business value | □ |
Return on investment examples | □ |
Sponsor observations | □ |
The more boxes you can confidently tick, the stronger the evidence that coaching is delivering value.
Final Thoughts
Are you gathering the evidence needed to understand its impact?
Want to talk executive coaching and ROI? Get in touch
