What are some of the ways in which the results of executive coaching and leadership development can be measured?
Measuring the results, which in the business environment usually means return on investment (ROI), for executive coaching and leadership development programs can sometimes be elusive. Our clients will tell us that they are extremely pleased with the results of our work, but they can’t quite put their finger on how the hard business numbers have benefited. That is when we help them to see the tremendous benfits of professional executive coaching.
We start this process by exploring benchmarks that we had taken at the beginning of our programs. These benchmarks measure how well teams are meeting their objectives in both time and deliverables. We then explore the productivity of these teams after their leaders, and sometimes the entire team, have participated in our leadership development programs. In the vast majority of cases, the hard numbers (return on investment) immediately become clear. Teams that are well led, perform better against the bottom line in these ways:
• They meet their deadlines and often beat them. An added advantage is that they often do this while working LESS overtime than they did in the past.
• Their attrition rates are lower – meaning less valuable experience is lost and the cost in time and money of training new talent is drastically reduced.
• The quality of their deliverables in terms of meeting requirements is improved. Expectations management is vastly improved meaning they work to understand expectations in more clear terms and work to deliver against them.
There are other measures but those listed above usually result in thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars of improvement against the bottom line when compared to the same performance before executive coaching and leadership developing programs were in place.
