Assessing the Effectiveness of Executive Coaching

Over the past couple of years, TSG has provided executive coaching as a part of the firm’s organizational effectiveness portfolio. And although the popularity of executive coaching has increased dramatically in both the practitioner world and academia, we are not sure that we have kept up with assessing the effectiveness of executive coaching.

As with the organizations we represent, the coaching frameworks used reflect the individual entity's vision and mission as well as the needs of the participants. Understanding that executive coaching is a multidisciplinary practice, and professionals from many different scholarly backgrounds provide coaching services in different ways and for different reasons, it is difficult to unilaterally assess coaching effectiveness.

Nonetheless, a group of researchers conducted a meta-analysis of the empirical research as well as reviewed the retrospective studies evaluating coaching effectiveness in 2009 that TSG has utilized to help organizations determine how they might evaluate the effectiveness of their executive coaching program. The six areas they identified that impact the way programs should evaluate coaching effectiveness are as follows:

(1) Summative versus formative evaluation

(2) Return on Investment (ROI) versus coaching objectives

(3) Research design employed to assess coaching

(4) Developmental versus remedial coaching

(5) Skill acquisition and behavioral change versus unconscious discovery and deep learning

(6) Interaction between the coaching methods and coaching content

It is hoped that these areas will help guide the future of coaching evaluation research and practice regarding executive coaching effectiveness.

*De Meuse, K. P., Dai, G., & Lee, R. J. (2009). Evaluating the effectiveness of executive coaching: Beyond ROI? Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 2(2), 11

Assessing the Effectiveness of Executive Coaching

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