Professional Services for CEO & Senior Team
Coaching Studies Reveal Positive ROI and Benefits for the Senior Management Team
If you are the CEO of an organization interested in hiring Patricia Harmon & Associates, or member of the senior management team, you certainly want to know about the projected benefits, costs and potential Return on Investment (ROI) for any proposed engagement. Our faculty and executive coaches understand your needs and concerns, and have summarized below some facts related to executive coaching ROI.
First, there are many economic analysis studies that justify the business case for coaching interventions often focusing on ROI, or coaching effectiveness. Having a positive ROI is clearly a “bottom-line” concern for all senior executives before making a decision to fund a business coaching engagement, with or without assessments.
Second, we also know that other senior executives realize that ROI is not the sole metric to determine value, impact, or effectiveness of coaching, because of the subjective benefits that are earned, and may be impossible to measure. ROI typically measures the impact on the target group (coaches) and the organization (stakeholders, colleagues, productivity, and other factors) by examining total benefits and costs rather than just the individual benefit to the direct recipient of coaching (the client).
Regardless of the importance placed on ROI by senior executives, at Patricia Harmon & Associates we are available to assist you with an ROI analysis, although we notice that this service is infrequently completed within our business engagements, especially by mid to lower level executives within the organization. We believe this lack of attention to ROI, even by some senior executives, stems from five factors including:
Difficulty of measuring more intangible outcomes and projected personal productivity benefits
Reluctance to quantify an essentially qualitative interaction within a person or department
A strong reliance on verbally reported outcomes, based on the belief system of clients that a significant change has taken place and therefore additional metrics are not necessary
Reluctance to accept ROI as a valid construct, and instead proposing alternative metrics such as a learning contract or a return on value (ROV) calculation
Availability of existing ROI studies that justify investments in executive coaching
However, as the CEO or member of the senior management team, we are available to help you calculate the ROI of a potential engagement expressed as a percentage based on the following criteria.
A calculation in dollars of the cost of a coaching intervention
Subtracted from a calculation in dollars of the benefits achieved
With the resulting amount multiplied by 100
Divide that total by the calculation of the cost of the coaching intervention.
Should you require additional facts or business cases to justify an executive coaching intervention, we will direct you to the pioneering studies, known as the “MetrixGlobal” and “Manchester” studies, quoted by literally hundreds of sources, that have been used extensively to illustrate the benefits of business coaching in general. The results of these studies have been generalized to all businesses that use coaches, but if you need further documentation of ROI within your particular organization for the benefit of the CEO and senior executives, please let us know.