Does Executive Coaching Work?

Read this post about executive coach here, and other executive coach article here and executive coach here first to make understand much about executive coaching.

Does Executive Coaching Work?

In the past ten years, the meteoric rise of executive coaching in organisations must mean that it is having a positive impact upon organisations both large and small.

Eighty-eight percent of European companies report using coaching in some manner.

Moreover, a recent survey of 170 Human Resource professionals determined that more than 50% had set up a coaching programme in the past 18 months (The Hay Group) and a random survey of 248 Human Resource Managers demonstrated that 55% of their organisations use formal coaching as an employee development method (Society of Human Resource Management, 2005).

Why is the Use of Executive Coaching Increasing?

A 2004 study attributes these nine factors as the principle forces driving the increasing use of executive coaching:

1. Rapidly evolving business environment
2. Individual responsibility for development
3. Financial costs of poor performance
4. Popular development strategy
5. Supports other learning
6. Employees request coaching
7. Need for lifelong learning
8. Improves decision-making
9. Targeted, just-in-time development

(Chartered Institute of Personnel Development, 2004)

We know that there is a boom within the Executive Coaching industry, but does it work? In many companies the tracking of coaching outlay and the return on investment of coaching programmes has proven to be a monumental task.

Measuring results and returns for all learning and development solutions is always difficult, but it is doubly so with the customisation and uniqueness of coaching itself.

At the end of the day a lot of the feedback as to whether the coaching has worked or not has to be gathered from the coachee themselves and the people immediately around them as they will notice the changes in behaviours, attitude, outlook and above all results.

A lot of the organisations that we work for like to have a monetary figure put to the impact of executive coaching so that the sponsor can justify the spend to the finance department and we do work with them to provide this. However, more and more companies are now seeing Executive Coaching as the “right thing to do” and are channelling their energies into getting right programme for their leaders rather than having to worry about justifying it before it even begins!