Develop Leaders
One of our clients recently started using Performance Leaders' 360° Leadership Assessment to increase the scale, while decreasing the cost, of an existing executive coaching program. This case example points the way to a broader opportunity for companies to deploy executive coaching as a systematic process to develop broad cohorts of leaders, rather than as an intervention applied to a few critical cases.
Executive coaching is an effective and increasingly common tool for organizations to use to accelerate the development of their leaders. For many organizations, 360° surveys are a valuable component of an executive coaching program and are used to assess an individual's leadership capabilities, create development plans, and measure progress. According to the Executive Coaching Network, 90% of executives going through coaching are promoted within six months of the coaching process -a statistic which may say as much about how carefully coaching resources are applied as about their role in preparing executives for promotion.
Due to cost, the benefits of executive coaching are usually reserved for senior management. Based on the premise that executive coaching is useful at multiple levels of an organization, we set about developing a model for scaleable coaching. We believe that the interpretive feedback and cost effectiveness of Performance Leaders' 360° Leadership Assessment make it an effective tool for implementing a scaleable coaching program.
Criteria for Scaleable Coaching
In order for a scaleable coaching model to be useful, it should:
• Create focused developmental relationships at key "points of inflection" in a leader's path through the organization
• Take into account such factors as organizational culture and identified leadership development needs
• Build in flexibility, so that organizations can quickly adjust their coaching program in response to situational changes (e.g. reorganizations, budgetary concerns, growth)
• Leverage the benefits of scale by providing aggregate-level information that can help to guide Human Resources and senior management
Performance Leaders helps make coaching programs more scaleable by giving the leader and coach rapid, thorough diagnostics without an extensive interviewing process. The leader and coach can then focus on areas of high potential impact, with the company's investment going directly into the process of behavior change -- rather than into the coach's data gathering process. The Performance Leaders 360° Leadership Assessment provides detailed feedback and specific issues for a leader to think about, enabling them to prepare for work with a coach effectively, and to get as much as possible from their time together.
The following diagram to represents 1) the factors that will drive the structure of an organization's coaching program and 2) the spectrum of options that an organization can choose to implement, making use of long-term coaching, short-term coaching combined with interpretive feedback, or interpretive feedback alone. Resources can be reallocated within this spectrum based on changing availability and needs.
In developing an executive coaching program, organizations should consider the benefits and challenges of each end of the spectrum of options, from individualized coaching to complete reliance on Performance Leaders. We have identified the major considerations in the following diagram:
Scaleable coaching may be a powerful way for organizations to develop current and future leaders. While Performance Leaders' automated, interpretive feedback cannot replace the human element of coaching, it does provide similarly concrete suggestions, enabling organizations to realize the benefits of coaching programs at more levels of the organization than has previously been achieved.
