In the sixth blog of my “When to Build a Coaching Culture Series” I talk about setting goals and establishing the measures of success.
It’s hard to measure the value of time, particularly time to think.
If you want to spend money in organisations, you (more often than not) need to prove that it’s money well spent. We don’t build a coaching culture for its own sake – it’s for the benefit of the business, and the business needs to see that benefit. You can provide them with the evidence of that benefit by identifying measures of success up-front. What is it you hope to see as a result of coaching, and how will you measure that?
Set your goals
If your goal is to push decision-making down the hierarchy, that’s a tough one to measure with existing organisational measures. It will need to be self-reported by the leader and/or their people. You could do a before and after measure, such as “how much time do you spend on decisions and tasks that your team members should be doing?” Ask it at the start of the coaching and ask again at the end. In one recent coaching assignment, my client reduced that percentage from 40% to 15%, and he is still working on reducing it further, with the aim of freeing up a full 35% of his time.
If your goal is to reduce the time it takes people to embrace change and get back to productivity, again that’s a tough one to measure because how do you know how fast they would have moved back into productivity without coaching?
There will be some easier measures, that your organisation perhaps already keeps tabs of, which are high impact side effects if the above outcomes. For example, lower attrition, higher engagement, decreased absenteeism, less stress related illness. You may not be instigating coaching specifically to achieve these, but you will almost certainly see improvements.
Decide on the measures of success
Do decide on your measures of success before you commence the programme, so that you can figure out ways to gather the data as you go along. If you wait until the programme is underway, or finished, you’ve missed an opportunity to shape the coaching in a way that will achieve the outcomes you most want. Start with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey would say.
I mentioned leading and lagging measures in a previous post. The measures above are all lagging measures, those things you will see as a result of many micro-actions. Leading measures are those micro-actions that will lead to the lagging measures happening, so it’s as important to measure those so that you can see where tweaks might need to be made to those micro-actions.
For example, if this is what you are aiming for, how might you measure these micro-actions?
- Leaders use a coach approach to enable others to think for themselves
- Leaders use a coach approach to encourage people to do things they’ve never done before
- Leaders take the opportunity to use a coach approach during every conversation, every interaction, every piece of work
Again, I imagine that these will be self-reported measures, on an individual basis. But you’ll be able to measure the lagging measures at an organisational level.
At some point, you will want to consider how to integrate this into your performance management process, if this is to become an expectation of all leaders. But that is in the future. We’re starting small right.
At the heart of all of this is the value of time to think. Tough to quantify, but worth every penny of investment as you’ll get diversity of thought and innovation.
