What if the executive coaching your business is investing in isn’t solving the right problems?
Globally, businesses spend more than USD 105 billion on executive coaching and leadership development every year. When successful, this investment pays off, having a positive impact on factors such as the leader’s behaviour, attitudes, self-efficacy and resilience. However, for many other companies, executive coaching fails to produce genuine business results.
One of the main reasons for this is poor data. Whether it’s a 360-feedback session, psychometric tools or a comprehensive leadership assessment, the best way to get the most out of executive coaching is to start with information. Investing in coaching without this data is a bit like taking medication without running any tests to see what’s causing the symptoms. Sometimes you get lucky and it helps, but there’s a good chance it won’t get to the root issues. The result is lost money, misaligned leaders, poor succession outcomes and wasted time.
So how exactly do assessments improve executive coaching outcomes?
1. Assessments establish a data-driven baseline.
The right assessments provide an objective view of a leader’s strengths and areas for improvement. They also reveal underlying behaviours and patterns that may be contributing to challenges in the workplace. Without valid assessment data, coaches must rely on a manager’s evaluation or executive’s self-report to understand the issues at play. It’s not uncommon for these reports to be coloured by personal biases or blind spots. An objective assessment provides a data-driven baseline instead, which can be used for planning sessions, measuring success and proving ROI.
2. Assessments accelerate the coaching process.
Executive leaders starting with a new coach will often spend the first few sessions in a ‘discovery’ phase, during which the coach tries to understand their context and challenges. Assessments can help to fast-track this phase by providing coaches with a high-level understanding of the core issues. Sessions can quickly be tailored to focus on the executive’s specific leadership gaps, ensuring that every hour spent on coaching is high impact.
3. Assessments enhance self-awareness and buy-in.
People have been shown to respond to unfavourable feedback by disputing it, lowering their goals, misremembering or reinterpreting the feedback in a more positive light. However, when the quality and precision of the feedback is high, this leads to improvements in the participant’s willingness to accept feedback and make the effort to change.
This is where assessments come in. Objective evaluations are specific and typically future-oriented, focusing on development areas. The hard data makes it difficult for executives to deny their skills gaps and instead can act as a powerful motivator for change.
4. Assessments align stakeholder expectations.
Executive coaching can fail when the coaching goals are based only on the client’s personal priorities, rather than linked to business needs. Assessments provide a standardised tool and shared language for identifying which professional competencies the executive needs to work on. This ensures that sessions focus on increasing the leader’s capacity to do their current or future role, rather than spending time on lesser priorities that have minimal business impact.
Assessments provide the diagnostic data to ensure that executive coaching is creating measurable, relevant change for your business. It transforms your investment from a hopeful shot in the dark to a strategic tool for developing your best leaders.
