Leadership Revolution

CHAPTER 11The Power of Alignment

I'm having so much impact that I'm not getting credit for.

Coach: Maybe it's not the right impact.

Well, I think it is!

Coach: Right—but it's not just up to you.

As a coaching engagement nears its conclusion, everyone involved—the coach, organization, and the coachee—wants to see progress in the development of the coachee's leadership capabilities. The penultimate session, then, is the ideal moment to look back and reflect. It's the time to ask: How do we know development has happened? What development happened?

The underlying question—how do you measure progress?—is one of the interesting challenges that coaching had to contend with from its very beginning. In a broader sense, of course, this is an issue for all forms of leadership development, training, and organizational management in general. The more specific challenge for coaching was that it presented a new and different approach—the effectiveness of which wasn't easily captured by the metrics that had become most familiar to business by the mid‐twentieth century. Executives who participated in coaching engagements tended to be enthusiastic about the experience, but that enthusiasm was mostly anecdotal. (Particularly in coaching's early days, some executives didn't really want to disclose that they'd been coached at all.)

So if coaching is at the center of a whole updated and refreshed approach to leadership development, then clearly we need updated and refreshed methods of gauging ...