Can leadership coaching stem the Great Resignation?
As organizations reel from the sting of losing talent, one thing has become clear: Leaders need more support.
Between February 2020 and February 2021, a net 2.4 million women and 1.8 million men left the U.S. labor force, according to Pew Research Center. During this time frame, employment dropped by 8.5 million, a loss that Pew says could take more than three years to recoup. Some call it the ‘great resignation,’ but others call it what it really is…. a wake-up call to do something to engage and retain employees before they even think about exiting the door of the company.
Related: Employers beware the ‘new hire cliff’
As organizations reel from the sting of losing talent, one thing has become clear: Leaders need more support. Whether it’s event-specific such as a compliance training class or ongoing daily access to leadership coaching, the companies that are using the great resignation to re-calibrate are emerging as the employers of choice.
Coaching for leadership
The number of organizations using leadership coaching for talent development has been growing. Sounding Board recently surveyed more than 450 L&D practitioners. The results show that 72% of organizations have implemented some type of leadership coaching; yet only 28% have formal internal coaching. Many organizations rely on informal coaching or external partnerships to develop leadership skills.
Leadership coaching helps build current leaders’ skills along with identifying and developing future leaders. 80% of organizations feel that their principal need in leadership is improving skills for individuals. Developing leadership bench strength, increasing employee engagement and retaining key talent are also prominent needs. Organizations should have a commitment to filling skill needs and to the growth of individuals within the organization. Coaching can be a way to target specific needs and learners while keeping a focus on organization-wide requirements.
Investing in leadership development is becoming a priority for many organizations. From 2020 to 2021, 41% of survey respondents said their spending on leadership coaching has increased and 45% reported no change. When a number of other resources were being cut, most organizations chose to continue to support these efforts.
Few organizations source all of their coaching internally. 77% of organizations have at least a portion of their coaching outsourced. This means that, for many, the key to coaching success is dependent on solid partnerships with external coaches. Finding a trusted source of coaching that can deliver a return on investment is important to their growth.
Confidence in measurement
Some organizations, approximately 25%, consider their organization’s ability to measure the business impact of leadership coaching to be high or very high. These organizations tend to measure and report with consistency and accuracy. They are more likely to have formal internal coaches and invest across all business levels. They are also much more likely to invest in leadership coaching and use a variety of metrics to assess achievement and benefit.
Utilizing metrics like self-assessment and manager assessment alongside employee retention and customer satisfaction separates these organizations further. They are nearly 4 times as likely to present their stakeholders with ROI numbers to support the investment in leadership coaching. These organizations have self-assessment and manager assessment built into their learning platforms. The investments are paying off with higher reported productivity, more bench strength, better employee retention and greater quality of work among other reported positive outcomes.
High confidence in measurement becomes a positive reinforcement of both the coaching and the reporting. Organizations know their leadership coaching efforts are working because they have measured their progress and outcomes and this confidence increases the use of coaching. Reporting these measurements to the C-suite increases trust in the efforts and in the necessity of reporting, which increases the use of measurement and reporting. The key to being results- driven is to have sustainable records of the results.
Challenges and opportunities
For many, regardless of external circumstances, organizational culture makes change difficult. Introducing a new benefit such as leadership coaching requires some investment, but organizations will see positive ROI across all aspects of the organization.
Getting the most out of coaching means both individual learning outcomes and ROI. Finding excellent coaches, either internally or externally, and being able to quantify the results of their coaching can help an organization manage and scale their efforts to include more employees and cover more skill sets. The best management systems have the benefit of analytics along with engaging coaching sessions to allow HR leaders to see organizational trends and report ROI easily.
Better coaching drives better business performance and better metrics drive better coaching. Measurement should not be an afterthought in leadership coaching. Knowledge and access to that knowledge helps build a stronger platform for increasing positive results. Easy to understand and share metrics can be the foundation to strong leadership and a successful business.
Modern business leaders rely on the reporting of outcomes to influence the opinions of both internal and external stakeholders. Measuring the impact of learning and leadership initiatives is key to business success, but not every organization is excelling at measurement. Many of the skills of leadership fall into the category of soft skills, skills related to working and interacting with other people, that are more difficult to measure quantitatively. While technical and analytical skills growth can be quantifiable, it is more difficult to put a number on the growth of self-awareness or communication skills.
The challenges to measuring and reporting leadership skill growth are not insurmountable. Some organizations have identified ways to evaluate the impact of leadership development on the company and are succeeding in meeting and exceeding business goals. It is entirely possible for more organizations to achieve these results and to report the ROI to organizational stakeholders.
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