Executives and managers, more then other people, are used to measure their results. Therefore, being able to prove measurable results of your coaching services is a valuable competitive advantage. However, this is not always a straightforward exercise, because coaches often deal in human behavior which is difficult to measure. Also, the client is often part of a complex system and his own results are mixed with those of others.
However, difficult should not be an excuse not to measure. There are many things that a coach can do to measure his results, and the first of them is to include, into the coaching agreement itself, a clause mandating that the client and/or the organization he is working for will aid the coach in performing the required measurements.
The most important measurement is the base measurement. One must know what the starting point was in order to prove any advance. But what will the measured metric?
Executive coaching is usually about improved results. The most important metric to measure is the one the level of the result that the client wishes to improve with the coaching. When this can be measured in throughput, or sales, or any other quantifiable metric, this is relatively easy to do, but what about a change of behavior?
Coaches are often employed to help "problematic" individuals improve on some aspect of their personal behavior. Such individuals are usually important to the organization, but their conduct is not according to what the organization would like it to be. The individual may have time-management issues, he may be constantly late, or he may tend to be abrasive to underlings and colleagues. What should a coach do when asked to coach such a person? How to measure the results?
The answer is really the same. When the organization decides that the individual behavior is an issue, they know what is bothering them, even if they do not define it clearly. The coach need to spend a little time defining this with the organization; How many times is he late in a month? How often do others complain about him? Such questions can lead to a measurable indicator of the desired behavior, or at least, to an acceptable assessment of such an indicator.
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