THE HALLMARKS OF SUCCESSin High-impact Organizational Coaching Programs

From the realms of manufacturing and healthcare to the educational and nonprofit sectors, organizations of all sizes and across a variety of industries have found that, when it comes to increasing employee engagement, reducing turnover, and taking individual and team performance to the next level, coaching works.

The International Coach Federation (ICF) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Organizations use coaching programs to meet a variety of business goals. Coaching can be used as a response to a specific issue, such as succession planning, executive burnout or organizational expansion. Increasingly, organizations are recognizing the value of sustainable coaching initiatives that improve company culture, assist development in high-potential employees and enhance work processes.

The 2014 ICF Global Consumer Awareness Study explored both the impetus and outcomes of coaching relationships, according to the consumers themselves. The study found that among those who’ve participated in a coaching relationship, the most frequently cited reason for seeking coaching was to optimize individual or team work performance (42 percent), followed by the desire to expand professional career opportunities (33 percent) and to increase self-esteem/self-confidence (31 percent). These clients expressed high levels of satisfaction with the coaching experience, with 85 percent of coaching consumers reporting that they were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with the experience.

CONTENTS

4 Made to Order

6 Buying In to Coaching

8 Top-flight

10 Making the Grade

12 Success Strategies

13 About

The ICF is the largest worldwide resource for professional coaches, and the source for those who are seeking a coach. We are a nonprofit organization formed by individual members-professionals who practice coaching, including Executive Coaches, Leadership Coaches, Life Coaches and many more, from around the world. Formed in 1995, today the ICF is the leading global organization, with over 20,000 members, dedicated to advancing the coaching profession by setting high professional standards, providing independent certification and building a network of credentialed coaches.

Visit our website at Coachfederation.org

85 percent of coaching consumers report that they were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with the experience.85%

Within organizations that have made the commitment to provide professional coaching, key decision-makers speak highly of coaching and its benefits. When asked about the value, impact and effectiveness of coaching, the organizational decision-makers who responded to the 2013 ICF Organizational Coaching Study reported broad-ranging impacts, including:

• Leadership development and performance• Increased levels of employee engagement• Reduced attrition• Improved teamwork

Organizational coaching programs have been developed in a variety of organizations around the globe, including JOEY Restaurant Group, the Defense Acquisition University, The Boeing Company and Isikkent Schools. While these four organizations are structured differently and have diverse missions and goals, their coaching initiatives are evidence that the hallmarks of a successful coaching program can be universally effective.

The ICF has identified four key elements central to effectively implementing an organizational coaching program. Each year the ICF honors businesses and organizations with outstanding coaching initiatives with the ICF International Prism Award. These four key elements are used as criteria for selecting winning organizations:

• Impact: A coaching initiative that yields observable and measurable value, influence or effectiveness.

• Standards: A coaching initiative that highlights a commitment to rigorous professional standards, industry excellence or best practices.

• Strategy: A coaching initiative that addresses organizational goals, strategic priorities and/or workplace needs.

• Sustainability: A coaching initiative that has become embedded into the fabric of the organization or that the organization plans to develop or expand.

Learn more about the Prism Award program at

Coachfederation.org/prism.

JOEY Restaurant Group is a premium casual-dining restaurant chain based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with 30 restaurants located across Canada and Washington State. The company has 36 trained internal coaches and more than 540 people in its coaching structure.

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ImpactWith accelerating growth, ensuring there are enough talented leaders in the pipeline to fill the new leadership positions is a primary focus within JOEY. Having a coaching culture has supported the senior store leadership teams to grow from 58 operators in 2009 to 82 high-caliber operators in 2014.

JOEY also uses external surveys completed by employees as part of the Best Workplaces in Canada program to track engagement and satisfaction. Al Jessa, Chief Operating Officer of JOEY Restaurant Group and an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC), said he believes that the organization’s annual appearance on the Best Workplaces list from 2010 to the present is proof of coaching’s impact on the organization.

“The anecdotal stuff is just undeniable,” Jessa added, citing the story of an average-performing chef who’d been with JOEY for more than a decade. Just one year after attending his first coaching session, the same chef had more staff members from his kitchen being promoted than ever before.

“He is just hitting it out of the park,” said Jessa. “So we asked him, ‘What changed?’ And he said, ‘I started coaching.’”

StandardsIn 2008, JOEY’s vice president of human resources, Andrew Martin, approached Essential Impact, an Executive Coaching firm and ICF-accredited coach-training provider, to learn how to build a coaching culture within the organization. Essential Impact provided 60 hours of coach-specific training to a class of 12 senior leaders and regional managers tapped to become internal coaches. A shorter course of coach-specific training was then offered to head office staff and head chefs and general managers of individual restaurants.

For JOEY’s internal coaches, training was only the beginning: Each JOEY coach was paired with a Mentor Coach provided by Essential Impact and was set up in a coaching structure designed to support the pursuit of an ICF ACC Credential. As the number of ACCs at JOEY has grown, the coaching structure has shifted to make more use of internal coaches but still retains outside monitoring to ensure professional standards are maintained.

“That relationship we have with [our external coaches] is critical because without their teaching methodology and without their

[ICF] certification we wouldn’t be able to do today what we do internally,”Jessa said.

Strategy

JOEY’s coaching program focuses on leadership development, conflict management and personal growth. Jessa said coaching has helped the organization meet its goal of creating world-class leaders by training and retaining top talent.

“We hire mostly people who grow into leaders,” said Jessa. “They have never led before. So, how do we retain them and give them the skills to be exceptional leaders?”

The answer has been offering continuing education and training to allow employees to grow their skills and knowledge while remaining at JOEY Restaurants.

“If you take on a leadership role within our company, we will provide a fully funded educational experience that allows you to get educated on the job. Our strategy is a retention strategy as well as an attraction strategy,” Jessa said. “Once people know that’s the kind of leadership culture we have, they realize that there is way more added value in a career with JOEY. We train people in coaching; that’s something most companies in our sector are not offering. It has become a massive competitive advantage for us.”

Sustainability

Sustaining that advantage is a critical part of JOEY’s coaching culture and leadership development framework. With coaching available at every level of the organization, from line staff to senior executives, everyone is encouraged to drive their own personal growth and their people’s growth by using coaching as a development tool.

JOEY’s commitment to high standards also goes hand-in-hand with sustainability. The organization has created a “Mastery of Coaching” development stream that supports its leaders through education and opportunities to coach and be coached in pursuit of an ACC and, eventually, of ICF’s Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and Master Certified Coach (MCC) designations.

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BUYING IN TO COACHINGThe Defense Acquisition University (DAU) is a corporate university that educates military and civilian defense acquisition personnel. DAU has trained 49 coaches, provided coaching for approximately 250 key leaders and impacted more than 4,900 people through its leadership development courses.

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Impact

DAU reports a non-financial ROI of 330 percent and a financial ROI of 743 percent from its coaching initiatives. DAU’s ROI measurement techniques were documented in a doctoral dissertation and subsequent monograph, Coaching ROI: Delivering Strategic Value Employing Executive Coaching in Defense Acquisition (Xlibris, 2011), by former DAU coach Alphronzo Moseley.

DAU clients have reported a high ROE in areas including organizational change, networking, strategic thought and leadership, leadership confidence, and time management.

End-of-coaching surveys collecting Kirkpatrick Level IV data illustrated positive impacts at all four levels: reaction (positive 92.5 percent value), learning (positive 90 percent value), application (top four impacts: improved strategic communication, better change implementation, enhanced stakeholder relationships, enriched leadership/people interactions) and business impact (top four impacts: increased self/group productivity, increased customer satisfaction, increased resources, reduced cycle time).

Measuring the total impact of coaching at DAU goes beyond an ROI equation where you plug in the variables, said Richard D. Hansen, Jr., ACC, director of leadership programs and coaching for DAU.

“How do you monetize team productivity and self-productivity?” he said. “ROI is kind of the Holy Grail, and I think it was good for us to prove internally to our leadership that coaching was a valuable use of the faculty’s time.”

StandardsSelecting the right coaches from within has been a key strategy for DAU since the organization began to explore coaching in late 2007. Of DAU’s 600-plus faculty members, only eight to 10 per year are invited to participate in a rigorous coach-training and qualification process based on the ICF Core Competencies and Code of Ethics.

“For us, it’s a senior faculty member—someone who may have spent 20 to 25 years in the service and knows about program management in acquisitions, so we are starting with someone very experienced,” said Hansen.

Over the course of a year, DAU’s coaches-in-training attend five two-day-long workshops that include active learning and constructive feedback through peer coaching and audio and video recordings and reviews. During the training process, each prospective coach is paired with a Mentor Coach from within the organization.

“They get to experience that coaching through a mentor before they go out and apply that to a live, breathing defense acquisition professional who’s trying to get a satellite launched,” Hansen explained.

Finally, to be qualified as a DAU coach, a faculty member must complete a practicum and successfully coach a leader for six months.

StrategyCoaching at DAU is closely aligned with customers’ business needs and the organization’s vision, mission and core values. Objectives are clearly mapped out to support the organization’s goals and priorities, Hansen said.

DAU’s coaching maps to three of five goals in the organization’s strategic plan and performance plan. Coaching has taken the organization’s already robust training and development offerings to the next level, going beyond the classroom and offering new, more-personalized opportunities for individual growth and learning.

SustainabilityHansen said that when he thinks about the sustainability of DAU’s coaching program, he asks himself three questions: What’s working? What’s not working? What’s missing?

“Nothing breeds sustainability like results, so that’s the ‘what’s working,’” he said.

But, the question that recently drew the most focus, in terms of sustainability, was, “What’s missing?” DAU’s coaches were doing a lot of one-on-one, Executive Coaching, but what was missing was team coaching.

“We actually want to take that to the next level now to impact a larger number of our leaders and their teams and programs,” Hansen said. “That’s one of the things that is missing in our area. You’ve got to be agile and flexible.”

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TOP-FLIGHTThe Boeing Company is the world’s largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems. Led by senior organization leaders, Boeing’s coaching program is in its 13th year. Boeing has a cadre of 13 internal and external coaches.

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Impact

Quantifying the value of coaching can be difficult, said Kristen Bruner, director of organization effectiveness and talent management at Boeing.

“There is a bottom-line piece, but there’s also a pipeline strength piece; there’s also a diversity and inclusion aspect,” she said. “There’s a multitude of things you need to measure for and a multitude of ways to measure impact.”

One of the key ways Bruner said the impact of coaching can be quantified is by the ever-increasing demand for the services within Boeing. “We have built demand models, and we have no idea how we are going to meet this demand. But we are going to meet it.”

Standards“We believe in the accreditation, standards and rigor behind this,” Bruner said. “We are currently hiring [coaches] and building those standards into our selection. At Boeing we believe in the right education [and] the right experience to deliver a job well done.”

Boeing’s coaches must earn their stripes and are ranked within the company for their leadership and achievement.

“If you want to be first on the list, you are captain of that ship,” Bruner said. “And if you don’t meet the standards, nothing happens to you, but you are in or out based on your own personal choices and what you are willing to do from a rigor perspective.”

StrategyLike Boeing’s other operations, Bruner said, its coaching program is lean and “it works.”

“It’s easy to access; it’s not frustrating; you get what you need when you need it,” she said. “There’s a quality of service that’s really, really important to us, all the way to shifting the language so you shift the conversation to what really matters instead of fighting the resistance to the word ‘coaching.’”

Boeing’s strategy is to carefully match the appropriate type of coaching to the appropriate person at the appropriate time.

“For us, it’s about creating the right [coaching] products at the right time and making sure we have the right people delivering them,” she said.

“The internal [coaches] are trained up with the right level of skills, the same expectations we hold our externals to. It’s like any other business, but in this one, it’s building strong, successful, healthy leaders.”

Sustainability

The Boeing strategy and the key to its sustainability is to embed coaching into the company’s structure so it’s self-sustaining and continuously improving operations.

“My job is to make sure we have—through the work of the team and the leaders in the business units and functions across the enterprise—the right tools across multiple venues to support [leaders] in their work,” Bruner said. “First-level leaders have very different needs than executive leaders, but it’s our job across the board to make sure that we are meeting them.”

The idea is to create an environment for innovation, productivity and growth—the three requirements for a successful business—in every product line, she said.

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MAKING THE GRADEIsikkent Schools were established in Turkey in 1998 within a nonprofit foundation and provide a unique learning environment that brings students from preschool through grade 12 together on one campus. Isikkent’s holistic, creative and inquiry-based approach to education sets the school apart in a nation where most students measure their learning by their exam scores. Isikkent’s coaching program began in 2009. As of 2013, Isikkent employed 41 coach-teachers, and all of its teachers and staff had completed several hours of coach-specific training. Coaching at Isikkent is available to everyone, from administrators and teachers to students and parents.

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ImpactIsikkent’s leaders say their investment in coaching has paid off, with impacts that have exceeded their expectations. Students who have received coaching report improvements in their conflict-resolution abilities, capacity for setting and reaching goals, and cooperation and communication with peers.

“It gives us heart to think that everyone who participates in this program, everyone who takes just a little something away from this experience is likely to keep raising the bar,” said F. Okan Sezer, Isikkent’s former Head of School and a leading champion of the coaching program. “The children who benefit from coaching may themselves be teachers one day who will say, ‘I learned my Leadership Coaching skills at Isikkent Schools.’”

Disciplinary problems in Isikkent’s middle and high schools have declined sharply since the introduction of coaching. In the 2008-’09 academic year the middle school reported carrying out disciplinary actions against approximately 16 percent of the student population. In the high school, administrators reported disciplinary action against 26.5 percent of the student population during the same academic year. By the close of the 2012-’13 year, these averages had fallen to 2.08 percent and 4.74 percent, respectively.

Isikkent’s coaching culture has brought the school closer to its goal of achieving International Baccalaureate (IB) accreditation across all of its programs by fostering traits aligned with the IB Learner Profile, such as curiosity, open-mindedness and compassion. It has also empowered students to achieve their own goals for the future, with an impressive 94.1 percent of students in Isikkent’s 2013 graduating class earning admission to one of their top-5 university choices and 70.6 percent of graduates gaining acceptance to their first-choice school.

Teachers who have sought coaching provide similarly positive feedback about the experience, citing enhanced communication with students and parents and improved goal-setting abilities as benefits of coaching.

StandardsIn 2009, school leaders contracted an ICF Credential-holder and an ICF-accredited training program to provide training and Mentor Coaching. All teachers participated in a two-day-long induction course that introduced them to the ICF Code of Ethics and Core Competencies and addressed several coaching skills applicable to their work in the classroom. At the conclusion of the induction course, interested teachers were given the

opportunity to enroll in a full ICF Accredited Coach Training Program. More than 40 teachers took advantage of this opportunity.

“Isikkent has been empowering those teachers to be high-performance leaders in their chosen field,” Sezer said.

Strategy Coaching is available to anyone in the school community who wants it. The program is closely aligned with Isikkent’s guidance services, and with a parent’s permission, students are encouraged to schedule sessions with coach-teachers. Topics covered during coaching engagements have included goal-setting, planning for the future, interpersonal communication and conflict resolution.

The coach-teachers also coach Isikkent teachers and parents on a voluntary basis. Additionally, six coach-teachers are trained to administer Parent Effectiveness Training with an eye toward developing “coach-like parents” who are skillful at giving feedback, listening actively and asking powerful questions.

Sustainability

Coaching is more than just a student- or faculty- development service at Isikkent: It is the foundation of the school’s culture. School administrators allocated 24 percent of the school’s professional development budget for coach training for teachers.

All of Isikkent’s teachers and support staff have completed several hours of coach specific-training to better understand and support the school’s coaching culture, and coach training is integrated into Isikkent’s new-teacher orientation.

Isikkent’s coaching committee helped develop an infrastructure for the program. In addition to adapting the ICF Code of Ethics to form a cornerstone of the school’s culture, committee members revised commonly used coaching questions to suit different age groups. They also developed an initiative to market coaching to Isikkent students, teachers and parents, ensuring that it would be perceived as a positive—not remedial—intervention from the outset.

The coach-teachers collaborated with members of Isikkent’s information technology department to develop an electronic coaching log that they could use to document their coaching sessions while ensuring 100-percent confidentiality.

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STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESSSuccess Factor

Defense Acquisition University Strategy

JOEY Restaurant Group Strategy

The Boeing Company Strategy Isikkent Schools Strategy

Standards

• ICF Core Competencies and Code of Ethics as resources

• Rigorous coach nomination, selection and training criteria (character and experience)

• Post-coaching client assessment

• ICF-accredited training program developed for coaches

• Mentoring provided by ICF-credentialed internal coaches

• External coaches serve as Mentor Coaches

• Coaching skills training led by graduates of ICF-accredited programs

• All engagements governed by the ICF Code of Ethics and organizational non-disclosure agreement

• Internal and external coaches with ICF Credentials utilized in enterprise

• Program developed and administered by ICF Credential-holders

• Faculty and staff trained via ICF-accredited programs

• School Coaching Committee develops and executes initiative’s policies based on ICF Code of Ethics

Strategy

• Aligned with customers’ business needs and DAU’s vision, mission and core values

• Objectives clearly mapped to key organizational goals & priorities

• Coaching a high-impact “beyond the classroom” learning and performance engagement

• Initiatives align with organizational values and are in service of increasing personal and organizational performance

• Used as talent-development and management-training tool

• Increased attraction and retention of talent at all levels

• Aligned with enterprise talent and business strategies

• Initiative branded as accelerator for talent, enhancing individual performance for improved organizational performance, business results and engagement

• Initiative can be mapped clearly to strategic goals/objectives

• Initiative aligned with school’s mission of fostering creative, self-motivated students

• Goals of coaching map onto IB Learner Profile

• Initiative designed to promote coach-like interactions among faculty and staff

Sustainability

• Growth of a culture of coaching• Adaptability in coaching process

and products• Ardent coaching champions• Partnering with other governmental

agencies to develop a common, ICF-aligned coach-training curriculum

• Internal coaching machine led by senior organizational leaders

• Four cohorts of coaches working toward ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) status

• Coaching available at every level, from line staff to senior executives

• Senior leaders who advocate the coaching strategy

• Coaching embedded in multiple talent processes and development programs

• Initiative in place to create culture of coaching

• 24 percent of professional development budget allocated for coaching

• Coaching-skills training provided for all faculty and staff

• Parents trained to be more coach-like, ensuring greater consistency between school and home

• Teachers use coaching skills as part of classroom management, pedagogy

Impact

• Approximately 250 key leaders coached; more than 4,900 impacted by leadership development courses

• End-of-coaching Kirkpatrick Level IV data illustrates positive impacts at all four levels

• Increased demand from customer referrals

• Included on Best Workplaces in Canada lists every year since 2010 (based on surveys of employee engagement and employee satisfaction)

• Demand for coach training outstrips availability

• People from across the organization connected to and being developed by one another

• Positive testimonials and advocacy from coaching recipients

• Significant ROI measured within organizations with strong emphasis on Leadership Coaching

• Positive testimonials from coaching recipients

• Increased demand for coaching

• Increased enrollment• Decrease in disciplinary issues• 94.1 percent of graduating class

admitted to a top-choice university• High reported ROE

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What is coaching? Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.

Find answers to other frequently asked questions about coaching at Coachfederation.org/coachingfaqs.

Internal versus External CoachingInternal coaches are often managers or other employees trained in coaching skills but who retain other responsibilities within the company. Internal coaches have a deep knowledge of the company structure and goals that can help them in their coaching duties.

External coaches are hired on a contract basis and often work with multiple clients. They can bring a fresh perspective to a company and can more readily avoid conflict of interest or confidentiality issues.

Learn more about how organizations utilize internal and external coaching by reading the 2013 ICF Organizational Coaching Study at Coachfederation.org/orgstudy.

The ICF International Prism AwardThe ICF International Prism Award program recognizes businesses and organizations with outstanding coaching programs that fulfill rigorous professional standards, address key strategic goals, shape organizational culture, and yield positive impacts. The award is presented annually at a ceremony that brings together the for-profit, government and nonprofit sectors in celebration of the impact of organizational coaching.

Learn more at Coachfederation.org/prism.

13Discover more tools to start the conversation about professional coaching within your organization at Coachfederation.org.