Making the Most of Your Coaching Dollars (Four Main Coaching Approaches)
Why consider coaching?
Coaching is an investment and a tool to solve problems. You would consider coaching side by side with other investments and tools such as consulting, software, hardware, staffing, etc.
It can help accomplish things faster, with longer-lasting results, and more permanently. The way coaching works is with not just the ‘what’ of problems. Such as the surface of this transaction and that methodology.
It goes deeper into the who. Why we do what we do. It works on identities, values, behaviors, and habits. These deeper behavior changes, when intrinsically motivated, provide a shift. Such as the mindset of ‘I might have a cigarette’ to ‘I am a non-smoker. ‘
If you think about the problems any organization faces they are internal and external. Internal may include doing we have the right staffing? Do we have the raw materials of talent to execute our goals? External pressures may be time to market, outperforming the competition, and so on.
These changes require mindset shifts and behavior changes. Even a simple thought such as ‘ I need to expect more from my staff’ or ‘longer hours does not produce better product’
When you invest in coaching you are not investing in building more widgets, but you are investing in why this widget? Who the widget serves, and innovation of the widget.
All of this is important to note before getting into where we start with coaching to make the most of dollars because the wrong order may lose momentum and the culture shift we are looking for.
So let’s start with - bottoms up. Bottoms up is starting at the lower levels of the organization for our coaching program. This could be group coaching for individual contributors or one on one coaching for supervisors of large groups of people.
The benefits of this bottoms up approach are that the people who really want it, and can apply it immediately to their day-to-day work get to experience coaching and what an ‘ask vs. tell’ approach can do for them. They can see immediately that they take more ownership of their ideas, gain the courage to make alternative proposals and innovations, and have greater satisfaction with their daily work experience. Life feels less like 3perform or else, and managers immediately notice they have to do a lot less directing or telling.
There have been very successful coaching programs introduced in this bottoms up or almost grassroots approach. What to watch for? Be sure to measure before and after metrics that are important to this audience- perhaps sick time, retention, and employee satisfaction. Promote these results upward to justify the expansion of the program to other lower-level audiences.
The next approach would be tops down. This is my preferred method as I think it moves much faster once Executives experience true coaching. They see the benefits of a thinking partner, a blind-spot activator, and someone who challenges assumptions. Once leaders experience this – they recognize the benefits for lower-level employees immediately. Be sure to capture the anecdotal and measurable effects of the coaching – such as retained clients, reduced costs, or increased revenue due to the light bulb moments in the coaching engagements.
A third approach is with a targeted segment of the population. This may be an area that is difficult to recruit or susceptible to poaching by the competition. Imagine diverse candidates at a particular level or distinguished technologists. This population often needs to feel the company cares about their continued tenure and about them as people. They are often faced with acclimating to the new demands of a promoted role and how to juggle level at this level with grace. Retention is often the measure of this targeted group, but it also may be the level of innovation such as patents awarded, etc.
Finally, our fourth area is ‘the center of excellence’ This is an area that keeps the standards, policies, and methodologies of the coaching program and shares these best practices across multiple functional areas of an organization. They act as an internal consultancy spreading the benefits of coaching and ensuring the program is set up to succeed and take hold.
All four of these approaches have great merit and have been successfully proven methods for beginning your coaching program. They all have their own unique hallmarks and pitfalls to watch for.
Next week we’ll be covering some of these hallmarks and pitfalls to ensure your program gets off to a great start.
The key to the success of your program is to know what problem you are trying to solve. Do you need to build more trust, independence or solve your retention problem? What is your budget for your program? Are you making the mistake of considering coaching a feel-good effort vs. a powerful tool? If you need help positioning and planning your coaching program, I’m here to help. Just send a note to: shawna@shawnacorden.com
Our tool of the week: Identifying the real problem. We need to be sure we are asking the best questions to identify the real problems. I know from thousands of coaching hours that often clients are not entirely sure what the real problem is. They bring their topics, and what they are trying to solve but after some more introspection, we learn there is a more personal aspect to the problem – related to values and who they are.
SO, HERE’S YOUR fieldwork –because COACHING WITHOUT ACTION ISN’T COACHIng – IT’S JUST ENTERTAINMENT Practice asking yourself these questions:
What is the real issue here? If I solved this- how long would this solution last? What would be the permanent fix to this challenge be? Who would I have to be to adhere to this permanent fix? What would I have to believe for this to be true?