Crafting a Strategic Coaching Framework

How are you effectively leveraging coaching as a strategic tool to unlock individual and organizational excellence?   

As the acceptance of the value of coaching has become widespread, and the utilization of coaches has proliferated in the workplace, the challenge now becomes how we maximize the impact of this developmental method.   

There are four avenues through which you can embrace coaching in your workplace:   

• Utilizing internal coaches 
• Hiring external coaches 
• Employing AI  
• Instilling coach-like behaviors within your workforce  

  The scope of this writing will be to focus on the first two approaches. To ensure you are most effectively managing your coaching services, think of your program the same way you communicate a story: there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.

For your coaching initiative, these components are:  

• Selecting and matching leaders with coaches  
• Navigating the engagement process with multiple stakeholders  
• Capturing and sharing outcomes for both the individuals and your organization  

  In the sections below, we’ll explore each phase in detail. For additional tools and resources, look for the hyperlinks provided throughout.     

 

Select and Match  

Whether you employ internal or external coaches, the first step is to ensure your pairings are appropriate and effective. Within that dyad is where the magic happens, but creating the right match is not magic at all.  

 

Identify Coaching Candidates  

It begins by identifying the right people who can benefit from coaching. The first thing we are taught as professional coaches is that you cannot coach someone who does not want to be coached. This axiom must be respected and embraced, or you’ll be using resources unnecessarily. True leader transformation occurs when the leader is fully invested and committed to their own development. Recognizing this truth will also uphold the idea that rarely will a professional coach be willing to engage a professional who has been sent to them “to be fixed.” This starting rarely produces effective results and leaves all parties involved feeling unfulfilled.  

The most effective way to ensure you have the right coachees (I will use coachee, client, and talent interchangeably) is to have them take specific action in order to receive a coach. In other words, they should demonstrate a degree of effort that earns them the privilege of being coached. By embracing this strategy, you’ll know that you have someone ready and willing to invest the time and effort in their own development.  

When launching your coaching initiative, consider a process through which your developing leader must “opt in,” which may include inviting them to take actions such as:  

• Having their manager sponsor them   
• Authoring an essay to offer insight on their interest and intentions  
• Completing a questionnaire that delves into their motivation and hopeful outcomes  
• Interviewing for a coaching opportunity  
• Signing off on a document that clarifies the time, effort, and commitment needed  

   

Involve Managers  

Another key step in the process of identifying the proper coachees is to involve their direct managers. They should be articulate in describing what coaching can do for their talent and should also be able to speak about why a specific individual warrants such an investment.   

At Bluepoint, we often use a rubric for assessing someone’s qualification that we call the 4A’s:  

• Aptitude: Does this professional demonstrate that they can make more contribution to the organization than what we’ve been asking them to do? Do they possess a high performance ceiling?  
• Aspiration: Has this individual expressed an interest in personal and professional development? Does this person have a desire to do more?  
• Attitude: What have you observed about how this person carries themselves every day? Are they positive, contributory, collaborative, inclusive, with a can-do outlook?  
• Achievement: What has this person’s performance demonstrated about their ability to get things done, meet or exceed goals, and move the business forward? We are looking to invest in those with proven performance.  

We have found that using these guidelines as selection filters for professional development is highly effective, especially when you are about to invest significantly in coaching services.     

 

Consider Coaching Options    

Let’s turn over the coin to focus on how to find the right coach for your clients. We believe that your coaches, whether they be internal or external, should meet standards that your organization sets for such partnerships, which is why guidelines for selecting them are important.    

External Coaches  

External coaches bring a specialized skillset and extensive experience from working with diverse organizations and industries. They can offer unbiased perspectives and fresh insights, but may lack familiarity with your organization’s unique culture, processes, and political dynamics.  

Key considerations when evaluating external coaches:  

• Are they credentialed by a coaching governing body?  
• Do they belong to a coaching body that subscribes to ethical standards?  
• Does their experience indicate familiarity with clients like yours?  
• Is the coach’s philosophy consistent with your organization’s?  
• Can they articulate coaching style flexibility?  
• Do they feel like a good cultural fit for you?  

Internal Coaches     

Many large organizations employ internal coaches of their own. These are either full-time or part-time professionals who, ideally, have met the criteria mentioned above. Their deep understanding of the company’s culture, structure, and internal dynamics can make them particularly adept at navigating organizational challenges. Internal coaches are typically more accessible and cost-effective compared to external coaches, though their close involvement with the organization can also introduce personal biases.  

In addition to your internal coaches, consider involving a subset of your internal employees or leaders as formal coaches. While these individuals may not have formal coaching credentials, leveraging their existing knowledge and leadership skills can be extremely valuable, depending on your goals and desired outcomes.  

   

Match Process  

Once you have chosen both your talent and a coaching pool, the final phase is matching the right coach for each individual. While there is no need to overengineer this action, it is a critical one. All great coaching engagements operate under the presence of trust, and setting that sense between the parties is paramount.  

What is most common is for the talent to be presented with 2-4 possible coaches who have been approved by the organization. The talent can review bios and schedule a brief meet-and-greet conversation with prospective coaches The purpose of this conversations is to get a feel for how the two might work together, and to give the client a degree of autonomy in making their personal choice among qualified professionals. Providing the talent with this element of control will elevate her/his commitment to the process compared to being assigned a coach without their input.   

 

The Engagement Process   

Terrific. Your coach and client have been matched. Now what?    

 

Readiness for Coaching    

Expectation setting moves to the forefront, and here we like to create a proper coachee mindset. While coaching has become more widespread, it is wise to assess whether a specific talent has been previously coached. If not, a terrific way to set expectations is to clarify what they should be prepared for and how to set their mind for maximum benefit.     

A second personal checkpoint for the client is to be comfortable that they are, in fact, ready to be coached. Helping the talent think about why they are doing this, and why now, is an extremely helpful way to begin the engagement. They are about to invest time, energy, and meaningful effort to advance their practice. Getting clarity on their purpose and intent will provide great meaning.     

At Bluepoint, we’ve developed a typical list of reasons why someone wants to be coached that your clients can study prior to their first coach meeting such as:  

• You’ve recently received some valuable feedback, and you want to address it, but you don’t know how  
• You are experiencing a significant change in your role, and you would value a fresh perspective to help you challenge assumptions and explore possibilities  
• You find yourself challenged with some key work relationships, and you know they need to be improved  
• You aspire to move beyond your current leadership role, and you’re looking to craft your next steps  

Now that your talent is prepared for their initial coaching session, they can easily flow into a typical engagement process. To be clear, no two engagements are the same; there are simply too many variables to consider. However, most engagements do follow a similar process that is driven by the coach. At the macro level, it unfolds like this:  

   

As you can see, there really is no hidden mystery in the coaching process.    

 

Build Relationship  

We begin by establishing a solid, trusting, open relationship between parties, and setting ground rules for the work. This includes any administrative elements such as scheduling sessions, deciding between in-person or virtual meetings, and how to prepare and follow up conversations. It is also an ideal time to discuss any of the client’s perceptions about what coaching is, to align the two parties with what will occur and who is accountable for what.    

 

Define Context  

The focus then turns to a deep understanding of what is currently happening for the client.   

• What are their actual and perceived realities that brought them into the coaching dynamic?   
• What has transpired for them to step into this space at this time?   
• What types of input or feedback data are available for the client to bring into this work (performance reviews, 360 results, stakeholder commentary, etc.)?   

While the coach will focus their attention on the talent, understanding the context of where the client is performing can offer great insight to inform potential courses of study and action.    

 

Future Vision and Explore Current Realities  

Eventually, the work moves into the phase of defining and articulating what the client would like to have happen, what they wish to learn or do, and what outcome they seek. This in turn requires a careful assessment of how their current situation is impacting that desire, and what role they need to play in the pursuit of their own goal. Often this begins by defining an ideal state and comparing that to the current reality. This sets the framework for the desired path and offers the client an opportunity to define a personal outcome of the work. Coaches will use a wide variety of tools and exercises to help the talent describe what they wish to pursue. Making these intentions visible and concrete provides fuel for the journey. Articulating what success looks like is a critical part of the process.    

 

Set Goals, Build Plans  

At this point, the client will be able to identify a specific developmental objective. The delta between what they are currently experiencing and what they desire has become clear, and a goal can be set. Many coaches will use a tool or coaching plan to help the client think through elements of their intention such as goal timeframe, dependencies, barriers, resources needed, and time trade-offs. At this point, the pair have a working document to track progress and itemize specific learning steps and activities. Focus becomes tactical and implementable, and through this work the client will begin to take action to adopt the new behavior, skill, mindset, or other needed changes.    

 

Close Engagement  

Finally, the engagement closes when the coach and client can validate the desired learning and progress. Many coaches will ask their client to document what they have learned and how they anticipate cementing their newly acquired abilities. They will also challenge the talent to define how they will hold themselves accountable for these intentions while considering if other people may be needed to provide ongoing support.    

 

Involve Stakeholders  

Since the talent will be employing their new skills and approaches in their work context, there is great value in inviting the leader’s stakeholders into the process at this time to function as a support and reinforcement system. Often the coachee will share what they’ve been working on and communicating how their colleagues can assist in rooting the new behaviors day-to-day. If the coach-talent pairing was created by an organizational sponsor, both parties will now reengage with that individual to confirm the engagement closure.

Rarely will the actual work done within the dyad be specifically shared, but it is common for the sponsor to gather input such as:  

• Was a specific development goal defined?  
• Did your work stay within the defined parameters of the engagement scope?  
• To what degree was the development goal achieved?  
• What additional support may be needed for the client?  
• How satisfied is the talent with their coach and the overall engagement?  

This data enables the sponsor professional to assess the effectiveness of the work while capturing anecdotes of coaching success to share as needed within the organization. This is a natural lead-in to our last section.    

 

Capture and Share Outcomes     

The case for justifying the investment in coaching is by now well researched and documented. You can spend hours combing through numerous studies available online that make this development methodology beyond question in its return. For example, according to ICF, coaching provides a 70% increase in personal performance, 50% elevation in team performance, and 48% rise in organizational performance, or similar data points. For most organizations, however, the challenge is to define the return on investment measures that have most meaning for them, specifically.     

To answer this call, let’s look at results from two perspectives: the coachee and the broader organization.    

Personalized value for the talent is evident under numerous labels. Most common examples of how a coachee would describe their benefit from an engagement include:  

• Increase in confidence  
• Elevated resilience and reduced fatigue  
• Improved communication skills  
• Better stakeholder relations  
• More effective decision making  
• More productive time management and prioritization 
• Strengthened emotional intelligence  
• More effective stress and change management  

   

Qualitative Feedback   

While it is difficult to place a financial figure on returns like the list above, their value cannot be minimized. The effort by the coaching service sponsor therefore is to design and implement systems that capture this type of feedback. The most successful methods to do so involve the completion of post-engagement questionnaires or surveys by the coachees themselves. This ensures collection of information directly from the primary player in the equation and gives the sponsor some flexibility in choosing what feedback they seek. Typical surveys will gather feedback about the engagement satisfaction and effectiveness.   

Engagement Satisfaction  

Satisfaction, in this context, is concerned with the client’s assessment of how they felt about the process and the coach.   

• Was the matching process effective?   
• Were the communications clear?   
• Did they feel comfortable and confident with their coach?   
• Were the sessions timely and productive?   
• Did they have a sense for how they were moving forward and felt secure in the engagement process?   

Engagement Effectiveness  

Effectiveness deals with the achievement of growth objectives.   

• Were they able to define a development goal, and to what degree was that goal achieved?  
• Did the coach offer timely exercises and activities to help the coachee make their own progress, and was the coachee able to feel and see progress being made?   
• To what extent does the talent feel that the growth will be sustained, and do they have a plan for post-engagement support?   

This type of program feedback shifts the focus from the individual alone into the effect the individual will have in the workplace, and therefore becomes the bridge into organizational impact.     

 

Quantitative Feedback   

Gathering hard data on the broader organizational return for coaching investment continues to be challenging. It is extremely difficult to carve out the impact of coaching from all the other factors that affect business’ performance such that you can measure those changes in an isolated way. However, enough research has been conducted that validates the worthiness of the investment. Common meaningful data for you to assemble includes:  

• Leader and key employee retention  
• Leader’s team retention and turnover  
• Team morale and engagement   
• Company-wide morale  
• Number of coachee promotions  
• Number of coachee expanded and/or new roles  
• Speed of change adoption  

   

Cultural Impact  

The final consideration for the impact of coaching on your organization centers around its contribution to your culture. While data and statistics have their place, what transpires in informal conversations among your employees is the real rubber-meets-the-road measure of what it is like to be in your workplace. This drives your engagement levels, work effort, turnover, recruiting, innovation, flexibility, and forward-moving energy. And the strongest influence on what employees discuss is what they hear through stories.     

Coaching, and all development activities, have their greatest impact on workplace culture when examples and case studies of progress and success find their way into everyday interactions. The role of program sponsors and senior leadership are to collect these stories and make them visible, not as marketing matter or as self-promotional, but as genuine illustrations of the organization’s values and core beliefs. As you seek to validate the return on coaching, you must adopt a methodology to glean, retain, and distribute success stories throughout your organization.    

In closing, design your coaching services by partitioning your work into three sections: identifying and matching the right people, crafting and executing the engagement process involving multiple stakeholders, and capturing and sharing evidence of coaching success. There are few developmental methods that provide the transformational experience that coaching does. Here’s to your successful application!