By Ros Soulsby

Coaches need to be more systemically minded, more challenging and more evidence-focused.
In her opening address at the conference, Caroline Sandler, head of Sandler Consulting Executive Coaching Practice, underlined the importance of accountability – both for the individual being coached and the organisation commissioning coaching.
She said that in spite of the economic climate, coaching programmes and practices were very much alive in business.
However, clients were becoming more discerning and demanding of intervention results. Sandler found this raised three key points: coaches should be more systemic in their thinking, more challenging with clients and more evidence-focused in evaluation and measurement.
Coaching is a young profession, she said. The challenge is to continue to grow into an ongoing and commercially viable part of the business community.
Increased credibility in coaching interventions means being focused on evidence-based results, even if this means “playing down the benefits and playing up the costs”, said Jo Holliday, ROI evaluation specialist at abdi.
Holliday said that key challenges for coaching programmes would be to build in evaluation plans up-front with precise impact objectives and
a way to gather data – which costs money.
Some coaching programmes had returned a negative ROI because of the high costs of implementation in year one, but the programmes’ impact objectives were still met.
She emphasised that this negative return was common in rolling out programmes as evaluation measures are based on the first year after the programme, with no time for benefits to mitigate initial outlay.
Her suggestion for the critical question to ask anyone attending a programme is: “To what extent is it relevant or important to your role and would you recommend it to someone else?”
Kirkpatrick’s measures still play a principal role in the evaluation of coaching results, although they do not go the whole way.

Volume 7, issue 6