The coaching custodian of an organization holds the key to maximizing coaching impact for the company. They might think it is the role of coach, but it all starts with them.
Let me explain. But first, a word about this new term, “coaching custodian.”
This is the person in an organization who is responsible for coaching. If it’s a large organization with a dedicated role, that might be a head of Coaching. Or it may be part of the role of the Learning and Development or Talent Development or Organizational Development Lead. The smaller the organization, the more likely this is the responsibility of the HR lead, who splits their time across all of the above people-related activities.
In this article, I focus on the strategic level of custodianship—the ideal, if you like, recognizing that resources are often spread much thinner than this. If an organization is to get the most return on investment from its coaching investment, then it is important to pay more attention to the set-up than might currently be the case.
Potential Coaching Custodian Responsibilities
I have met several coaching custodians, who aren’t coaches and don’t really know what it means to be a good custodian. In fact, they have been relieved when a coach has offered to help them to understand how they can set up coaching for greater impact. There is no set curriculum for coaching custodians, but here is a run-down of what the strategic coaching custodian might take responsibility for:
- The business rationale for coaching in this organization
- The purpose of coaching to meet the needs of the organization
- The relevant stakeholders and sponsors of a coaching program
- The coaching pool—selection criteria and assessment/selection process
- Where coaching is useful and where it is not
- What kind of coaching programs will be put in place, that is, program led, individual development led, business driven, goal led, etc.
- Measures of success for coaching programs, tied to the business strategy
- Whether and how to use internal and/or external coaches
- How to harvest the learning at a systemic level
- The technology to support a coaching program
Screening for Coaching Readiness
The elements above are all about the coaching readiness of the organization to embrace coaching. Let’s look at the coaching readiness of the individual, as it’s the aspect that seems to be most inconsistent, in my experience.
What are the risks of not screening for coaching readiness? The organization won’t get the return on investment/expectations it hopes for!
A good screening process ensures that:
- Coaching is a good fit for the intentions of the thinker and the organization.
- The thinker shows up with a clear view of what they’d like to use coaching for, ready to think for themselves and willing to change in some way.
- The coach can do the job they’re paid to do—which is coaching.
- All other parties understand their role in the success of the coaching rather than expecting the coaching custodian and/or the coach to take the lead.
Thinker-screening criteria are perhaps not as straightforward as coach-screening criteria as there isn’t a set of recognized “thinker competencies.” That said, there are several researched factors that predict a positive shift in performance and the most common (based on Asay and Lambert, 1999) include:
- Level of motivation to engage in the coaching and to reach a positive outcome
- Ability to cope/style of coping
- Intelligence
- Openness to feedback and/or to the experience
- Learning orientation
- Level of self-awareness
- Level of self-efficacy
- Ownership and acceptance for the proposed need to change
- Commitment to making change happen
- Importance of the issue/opportunity
- Urgency
Measuring Coaching Readiness
What do you have in place to measure these aspects of coaching readiness? At the very least, what conversations do you have with the potential thinker about what coaching is and is not, their motivation to change, and their personal outcomes?
If you can answer, “Yes,” to the following questions, only then can you move to matching with a potential coach:
- Is coaching the best-fit intervention to meet the individual’s and the organization’s hopes and intentions?
- Does the individual want coaching?
- Do they need coaching?
- Are they willing to put in the work of thinking and of changing?
Then, how might you support the potential thinker to get ready for a compatibility call with said coach, such that they know what to ask and how to decide whether they can work with this coach?
And what do you provide to the coach by way of a briefing about the wider organizational context for the coaching and the coaching readiness of the individual so the coach comes across as well-prepared in the compatibility call?
Note: A compatibility call is NOT a screening call—that is your job.
The age-old chemistry call has become an ever-increasing mishmash of this, that, and the other, making it less effective than it might otherwise be.
Compatibility is more about whether the two people can see any reasons why they cannot work together, such as:
- Too great a divergence between the coach’s style of support in relation to the individual’s learning and thinking styles
- The coach’s level of challenge stretching the individual too far out of their comfort zone such that coaching would be stressful (Blakey and Day, 2012)
- The individual’s low motivation and commitment to thinking and change, which becomes evident as they talk with this impartial coach
- Any conflicts of interest that were not already picked up in the pre-screening
The output of the compatibility call is a bilateral go/no-go decision by the individual and the coach, where both parties have had full agency to choose. Where the decision is a no-go, the individual is matched with a second coach for a similar compatibility meeting.
This, in a nutshell, is the screening process that the coaching custodian must pay more attention to in order to derive the return on investment and expectations from coaching.