How a Talent Manager Used Coaching to Evaluate Development Programmes
by Greg Whiting
At the close of her latest management development program, Sharon was absolutely delighted. She had used coaching to support these programmes before but this had usually been restricted to providing feedback on psychometric questionnaires/360° feedback surveys and one-to-one support on overcoming personal barriers to completing the programme.
This time, however, she had also used the coaching input to ensure that the programme content was correctly matched to her participants’ learning objectives and to evaluate the programme’s outcomes and successes.
She’d done this by asking her coaches to:
- Help her participants set development goals, both for the programme itself and for their wider personal future, prior to the programme start;
- Feed emerging development themes back into the programme design so that the content could be tailored to meet them;
- Help the participants track and assess progress against their goals; and
- Evaluate the impact of both the wider programme and their individual coaching input.
The evaluation process had worked exceptionally well, proving to be:
- Comprehensive. The four quadrants of the evaluation model were ideally suited to capturing the full outcomes of a development programme—personal achievements, business performance improvements, impact on wider life and well-being and future steps focused on sustainability and long-term growth.
- Rich. The data from the evaluation was markedly richer and more complete than any other methodology because it was founded on long-term relationships with the evaluators and was the result of an in-depth, focused evaluation discussion. Questionnaires, however cleverly designed, had never been able to provide this.
- Sustainable. Each participant had been left with a personal Scorecard detailing what they had achieved and recording what they had committed to do in the future to maintain it.
- Measurable. Collating the Scorecard data into an Evaluation Report that included a sound, verified Return on Investment (ROI) element had been easy and incredibly persuasive in securing support for further programmes.
- Valuable. The evaluation had added almost nothing to the programme costs. The training manuals had been free to coaches and the Scorecards had only cost £25 each. The only other cost had been one additional coaching session per participant.
Greg Whiting is a Coach at OD Compass. Bullseye Coaching enables coaches to fully evaluate and record the outcomes and results of their coaching, including its value/return on investment. Coaches also get direct, personal performance and benchmarking data. Register at www.bullseye-coaching.com and pay just £25 for your first Coaching Scorecard.
IAC Member Benefit: IAC Members receive an additional Coaching Scorecard credit worth £25 upon registration (use the Referral Code on the IAC Membership Privileges page).
