Leadership coaching provides a range of benefits to companies, including strengthening your leader bench, helping with personal development, supporting diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI), reducing staff turnover, or reinforcing culture change.
Scaling up these leadership operations to enable more leaders to reach their potential is becoming increasingly important.
But how do you begin to scale your leadership coaching? We recommend (as all good coaches do), starting with questions…
1. Why Are We Doing This?
There are lots of great reasons to offer coaching, but before you start rolling out a coaching program – it’s important to identify your organization’s ultimate objectives. What do you want to achieve by offering leadership coaching across the organization? Ensuring these objectives are measurable and realistic is the first step toward delivering your coaching in a strategic way, and making making it easier to prove ROI.
2. Who Should Participate?
Consider how you’ll decide who’s included in the roll-out of your coaching operations. You might ask executives or business units to nominate leaders or review potential candidates’ HR performances, selecting those you determine would benefit the most from the coaching. You can focus on leaders who are ready to move up in the organization or who have recently been promoted. Or, you can take an inclusive approach, opening the applications up to all leaders in your organization.
Ensure that whatever approach you take is received as fair and equal to all employees. Communicate clearly to those who aren’t chosen how they can apply or put themselves forward again in the future.
3. What Should The Program Include?
Review what’s important to include in the coaching program based on your organization’s objectives (identified in question one). What are the development needs of the group you have selected? Does your organization have a competency model that supports learning and development efforts? Your program can combine coaching with existing competency models or learning topics and resources. It can include cohort-based experiences, involvement by managers, and use of assessments to build self-awareness.
4. Who Can Deliver It?
What resources do you have internally for delivering the coaching at the volume you require? Do you have internal coaches with the right skills already? Or, will you need to partner with a vendor to ensure that you have the objectivity that you need?
It’s important to consider the fit between your coaches and your participants. Coaches should be independent enough for the participants to feel like they can trust them, and be entirely transparent with them. If you utilize internal coaches, it’s important to emphasize confidentiality and reassure participants that there is no company agenda at play.
5. How Will I Know If It’s Successful?
Measuring ROI against your objectives is vital for determining whether the coaching program is successful. Always keep the initial objectives in mind, and track progress against these objectives.
You may have metrics you’d like to influence through coaching – for example, promotions, turnover, or engagement. Or, you may see success through the lens of the participants’ experience, asking for testimonials or feedback from participants’ managers. Always be clear on how you’ll measure success from the start, and get an understanding of what the C-Suite see as success from the very beginning too.
6. How Will I Manage It?
Coaching programs have a lot of moving parts – communicating with participants and coaches, conducting surveys to gather feedback, and making sure that everyone stays on track.
Consider the tools that you’ll need to execute this smoothly. A technology platform like Optify helps you keep track of meetings, progress, ROI, and documentation – so that everything is managed in one place.
7. How Can I Get Funding?
In order to get buy-in for developing your coaching program, you need to build a business case. This requires a connection to the overarching business strategy, and a clear, measurable plan on how the coaching will help achieve the business objectives, supported by evidence and data.
Armed with the answers to the above questions, and a plan for how this program will help the business grow, will help you make a strong case for further investment.
How Can Optify Help Me Scale Our Coaching Program?
Optify can help you scale your leadership coaching and development programs through our unique coaching platform and our expert coaching solutions.
With our Impact Guarantee, you can rest assured that you will achieve impact in five areas, across leadership, operations, finance, inclusivity, and well-being.
