Must Do: Focus on results, not coaching.
Or, as Lance Armstrong said, “Its not about the bike.” It’s about the body, mind, spirit that is riding the bike to the winners’ circle.
Executive coaching is alive and well. There’s no doubt that coaching has made the big time as companies are spending big bucks is a desperate attempt to fire up people’s unique talents.
Assumption: Most coaching programs suck. Does yours?
Here are some ballpark statistics from about 10 different studies on corporate coaching. Something like 59% of companies offer executive coaching programs. 87% of companies with coaching programs do not know the return-on-investment (ROI) for dollars spent on those programs. They are clearly not keeping score on their business results.
That’s equivalent to a football team coaching its players to play games without a scoreboard. No competitive juice. No urgency. No fun.
There’s often too much time spent on the coaching and not enough focus on driving and measuring business results as a result of the coaching sessions. The emphasis is on creating a coaching culture, not a business results culture.
Coaching can be a powerful way to increase business results by changing people’s behaviours that really influence the achievement of organizational goals.
First, you must identify the competencies that are required to carry out one’s job well. These include technical skills, the emotional intelligence to leverage the technical skills, the job knowledge required to apply the skills to the particular job and the willingness and abilities to collaborate with co-workers to further leverage the desired business results.
Once you’ve identified those competencies you cut them down to the three key behaviours that will give the “biggest bang for the buck” in terms of business results. The coach then works with the person to focus on those top three competencies.
Imagine this. A company with 100 employees chooses three “high impact business results behaviours” for each employee. They take a measure of how well people are doing those tasks today.
Two measures are used.
- How well people are performing the three tasks against what a job well done looks like.
- What kind of mistakes people are making while doing those tasks. Hopefully some measure of cost is associated with the mistakes that are recorded.
Then set up a business results focused coaching program with the goal of improving people’s behaviours toward the two measures of success for each of the three behaviours. The timeline is 90 days, during which those 300 hundred behaviours of the 100 employees, are to be improved by, say, 60%.
At the lowest level of expectation, if an increase in performance is about 20% per employee, the desired ROI per $50,000 salary would be $10,000 or $1 million per year.
The key to making this happen? The company must train, coach, compensate and reward managers for consistently and persistently engaging the business results coaching program.
Is your company able and willing to do what it takes to become more humanly and financially sustainable?
About the Author:
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Visit http://www.subject2change.ca/blog. From Dr. Jim Sellner, PhD., DipC. – The guy who works with you to create workplaces where people love to do their best and customers love to do business with you.
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