The real benefits of coaching

Coaching has been growing in popularity for the last few years . Some time ago when I first put up a coaching website I had loads of enquiries with me doing very little .

Nowadays the marketplace is bustling with coaches everywhere , in particular life coaches . There was even an event I once went to where lots of guests there were life coaches .

Life coaching teaching standards vary staggeringly and often are short – maybe just one or two  days , even correspondence courses where people never interact with someone else (which sounds mad – being a coach is about working with people !).

In some places the phrase ‘life coach’ is negatively and disliked hugely ! Business coaching for performance and working with executives necessitates great acquisition base for the coach in their toolkit . Some advanced coaching can also necessitate specific knowledge in the field being coached , although many people are taught that coaching should be content free .

Coaching in busness is very much about results and organisations usually require that there is some way of measuring the results to know whether the coaching works .

Organisations often want to know the hard benefits of coaching – such as increased sales figures , less days off or any other benefits that can be externally quantified . Coaching often delivers super useful soft benefits which can be difficult to quantify , such as job happiness , better motivation , and greater leadership .

Hard and soft benefits will both benefit organisations , however most organisations emphasize on the hard benefits because they are easier to measure . Many times the soft benefits are even more beneficial , however because they are more difficult to measure are sometimes ignored .

Hard benefits can more easily be objectively measured

How do you know what to measure ? This really depends upon the purpose of the coaching, because the data will vary depending upon the needs of the organisation . A large legal organisation I helped out wanted to increase the new business brought in by partners in the organisation, when the partners in the past never had to sell and didn’t feel comfortable doing this. The amount of new business could be measured over a period of time.

A purpose to lower absenteeism could easily be measured over a period of time to validate the results.

Soft benefits are often trickier to measure because they are not usually measurable with external data , but are often based on internal changes , such as increased motivation , happiness and self esteem , all requiring qualatative methods of research . Such results can make all the difference in an organisation influence performance, however are difficult to objectively measure .

So to measure the results or real benefits of coaching interventions, first imagine the outcome which will help you select the best method of measuring .

NLP Trainings in North London are run by Tom MacKay .