When do leadership training courses have high impact on employees?

Individual leadership training courses require significant investments of time and money, so it’s important to ensure the individual receiving coaching and the sponsoring company realize worthwhile returns. In our book, Coaching that Counts, we looked at the ROI data from individual coaching engagements to determine when does coaching have high impact?

We discovered there are decent monetary returns for addressing some of the low hanging fruit leadership training courses traditionally address, such as helping people get more organized, communicate more effectively, and let go of limiting habits. The greatest returns came when leadership training courses were used to support people to push the edge in their development and learn new ways to make more significant contributions. When coaching focused on helping people acquire more complex, outcome-oriented goals, such as effectively influencing larger groups to embrace change, or bringing diverse stakeholders together to accomplish a challenging task, coaching paid the greatest dividends. 

Unfortunately, it is common for leadership training courses to stop short of having high impact or taking on these more ambitious goals. Often coaching is only offered to people who “have problems” and concludes when the person has learned to fit in and play nice. This happens because coaches lack the skill or the training to support clients in acquiring more complex outcomes, or coaching budgets are limited so coaching stops before it has high impact on employees.  The underlying issue is one of perspective. When people think that leadership training courses is only for addressing problems their expectations are limited to these kinds of outcomes. When we expect more from coaching, it delivers more value.

In my experience, leadership training courses deliver high impact when the client is motivated to learn. There are certain times in a person’s career when the kind of intensive development coaching provides is particularly valuable, such as:

• Transitioning into a new level of leadership, or getting ready to transition, such as when a manager moves to her first executive role
   
• When a person does not receive an expected promotion and works with a coach to develop the capabilities needed to be successful next time
   
• When a person takes on a new and significant challenge, for example, leading a high-stakes cross-functional change effort 
   
• When gaps in a person’s self-awareness and/or skill level are limiting the person’s effectiveness and the individual is motivated to overcome these limitations. For example, when a person with great ideas can’t build the supported needed to implement them because he belittles people instead of engaging them to work with him
   
• After attending leadership training courses, such as a high potential program, participants work with coaches to apply the concepts they learned in their work.

Bottom-line: leadership training courses have high impact when they are used to support people to realize meaningful stretch goals at important inflection points in their careers.