Building an Internal Coaching Pilot

At my organization, Tech CU, we take our core value—“Cultivate”—very seriously. Although we’re a moderate-sized company, we have a series of development programs for staff—especially newer managers. We’ve also seen the value of Executive Coaching provided by external coach practitioners in the C-suite and for senior vice presidents. But, when we looked at our suite of offerings, we realized that we had an area in which we could improve.

Our particular gap is in tailored opportunities for mid-level managers to develop leadership competencies to make their next leap to senior vice president or beyond. To tackle this, we are designing an internal coaching program based on the individual client’s professional development interests. We’ve learned some good lessons along the way. In sharing them, I hope to help internal coach practitioners looking to expand program buy-in and participation at their own organizations.

To start off, we needed to make the case for the value of coaching. Fortunately, several members of our executive team already believe in the power of good coaching. As our chief operating officer Jeannine Jacobsen has said, “Investing in your people by delivering a good coaching program is a key component of a leader’s development. It helps instill critical practices as participants begin to understand what good coaching looks like and how to bring it into play themselves.”

Drawing from this idea, we used a current-state/future-state argument in our initial conversations. When looking at the succession plan, where there are blanks between middle manager and SVP/EVP roles, we noted that the conversations were never about bringing somebody’s technical skills up. Instead, the need was for soft skills, such as executive confidence or gaining buy-in. It’s not as clear how to develop those skills as it would be to send somebody to an advanced class on using Microsoft Excel.

We focused on our core value (“Cultivate”) to bring clarity to the issue. “Imagine,” we said, “that the next time you look at your succession plan, you have somebody in mind who has worked with a coach to grow further into their potential as a leader with deliberate and focused effort, and who has demonstrated a strong desire and ability to evolve.” For those who do need hard figures, we’re happy to bring out studies from ICF about improved bottom-line results.

Along the way, we’ve had the opportunity to explain what coaching is and what it isn’t. For instance, it isn’t remediation for an employee on a performance improvement plan, and we’re not offering an opportunity for senior managers to have us “coach” their teams to work harder or train them to do their daily jobs better. We have been clear that “coaching isn’t consulting and it isn’t counseling” in order to best manage expectations. We see light bulbs go on when a senior manager moves from thinking about how to “fix” somebody to imagining how to empower them. We also continually emphasize that this isn’t fluffy stuff—in each session there is a call to action and accountability.

To gain deeper support and additional perspectives on how a program could actually work, we selected a small group of senior and veteran managers and held longer conversations with each of them. We shared some simple graphics about where the process fits into our current offerings and gave them an outline of how it would work. We answered basic questions and then asked each manager to do two things for us. First, we asked them to meet with us again in about a month, after they had an opportunity to digest the concepts. Second, we asked them to consider which of their team members would benefit from participating in the program’s pilot. We got double value when we met again: They suggested refinements and delivered a short list of potential participants.

Some of the suggestions that came from these conversations included having more than one person trained as an internal coach so there is backup and continuity, emphasizing confidentiality, and ensuring that coaching agreements are between the client, the coach and the client’s supervisor. We also began to see a case for working to create an organization-wide coaching culture.

By building a case based on our core values and observed needs and designing a program with the input of current leaders from the beginning, we believe we’ve built a robust pilot that can further prove the value of internal coaching. We’re launching the program now, and a second member of a possible coaching pool will begin formal training from an ICF-approved provider later this year. We are excited to be living our core values with this program and look forward to being a key part of developing our next generation of senior leaders.