Boost Your Leaders’ Impact with Training on Essential Coaching Skills

As a first step, gather data on where your employees stand in regard to their coaching and feedback skills. Determine if your program will be for managers, for leaders, or available to everyone. Send out skill gap surveys that help your leaders evaluate how developed their coaching skills are and what they need and want to improve the most. Once you’ve collected data on key coaching competencies your employees need to focus on, define the goals you want to accomplish with the program. Some common goals are to improve succession planning, enhancing team performance, or boosting employee retention. Learn more about developing the right goas for your training program in this article.

Defining the KPI’s you will use to measure your program’s effectiveness is key. You should assess your program early and often and use the data you collect to inform any adjustments you make to improve it. Some useful KPI’s you should consider using for your coaching skills program are:
• Competency/ skills improvements – Great for skill-focused coaching scenarios like sales coaching. Post training knowledge assessments can be a great tool to gather data for this KPI.
• Behavioral changes – Measure how employees are applying what they’re learning on the job. Observational assessments and efficiency metrics can be great tools to gather this data.
• Coaching session feedback – Conduct employee surveys involving questions designed to assess their leader's coaching habits/skills/etc. This will help you round out the picture of how well your program is helping employees turn theory into practice.
Check out this article to delve deeper into how to build KPI’s for your L&D programs.

Make sure that the content and structure of your program is tailored to match the needs of the different roles and competencies within your organization. Including topics like how to give constructive feedback, receiving feedback with an open mind, and how to hold coaching conversations would be critical for current managers and leaders in certain departments but might not be as relevant for others. For example, a sales team leader would certainly benefit from a sales performance coaching content addition to their learning track, while an HR professional might prefer lessons around onboarding or compliance management. Check out our webinar to learn more about building the best training program for your organization

A big part of the success of your program will be based on how early and often you evaluate the progress and impact of your training, and how efficiently you make improvements as the program is implemented. One way to do this is by analyzing the data you’ve collected against your KPI’s and drawing out trends like engagement levels, completion rates and how relevant your employees feel the training has been – using artificial intelligence to analyze larger datasets can be very useful here. You can also use an evaluation framework like Kirkpatrick or CIRO models to know what questions to ask and what to do with your data. Make sure to use your findings to make changes within the first 30 days of your program and continue doing so on a regular basis. Read more about a useful training evaluation framework in this article.