Sponsored coaching is growing in popularity. This is because it offers a great deal more than traditional coaching, even at the executive level. If you’ve not come across it before, we explain what it is and just why we always recommend it.
To get straight to the point, the most fundamental reason as to why we recommend sponsored coaching is that it works. It really works, and we've got evidence of it.
If you’re not familiar with the term, then sponsored coaching is where you add a third person into the coaching mix. This person is called an “executive sponsor”. These executive sponsors are typically senior stakeholders in the organisation that provide insight as ‘the eye in the business’. This creates a triangulation of coach, coachee and sponsor that allows for a feedback loop that is essential for aligning the coaching process with organisational goals. But, more importantly, it also produces the advantage that the executive's development is visible and impactful, meaning the results can be measured.
How it Works
When we have the coachee and the business engaged, the individual makes progress against their personal objectives and organisational objectives. However, the key benefit from the sponsor being involved is that, as the eye in the business, they're able to provide useful insights for the coachee around how people are seeing them or experiencing them at that moment. It may be that feedback can be given from 360-degree performance reviews, sales and so on. It can be collated from a number of places to provide robust insight.
As coaches, we will explore this feedback with the executive sponsor right at the very start, before the coaching begins. Then we do the magical work with the coachee completely confidentially. This is why sponsored coaching works: we get the eye in a business, but we get the value of working with the individual in those sessions where they can be vulnerable. They can talk about limiting beliefs, blockers, difficult relationships, bosses, and all manner of challenges that we can flush through in detail.
After we've had usually three or four sessions with the coachee, we then bring back in the sponsor again. The sponsor won’t know anything about the sessions unless the coachee has shared it. The sponsor’s feedback can only be from day to day experience, and they are able to offer an indicator from the business what changes they’re seeing, or as the case may be, not seeing.
The vast majority of time, they report that they’re seeing changes, which is great. That means the internal changes that the individual has made has delivered an external impact. And if the changes aren’t as we would have expected, we can know to tweak the coaching sessions from that point on. Although this is rarely the case.
At that midpoint, we actually tend to find people have made more progress than they expected. So to add to that, with the sponsor there, we can set some stretch objectives as well. This is always a bonus, because both coachee and sponsor feel good that we're already moving in the right direction. We are able to achieve more than would be possible if we had adopted an unsponsored approach.
Unsponsored Approach
An unsponsored approach is usually just the coach and the coachee having a discussion. They may still make some really good progress, and often do, but there isn’t that eye in the business. They don't get the alignment back to the corporate objectives. The other thing that's really important is that, as a business, you're not getting a return on investment because you don't usually get any measurement. Sponsored coaching provides feedback based on real life observations from within the business. That’s nothing to do with your executive coach. That’s internal people saying for themselves whether progress has been made or not.
Unsponsored coaching is too limited. As it’s just between coach and coachee, the monitoring of it is purely the coachee’s own perspective. This is nice. We would always describe one to one coaching as being a nice experience. But a business is not benefitting from that triangulation, and from that real time tracking of progress.
Endpoint
At the endpoint of the coaching sessions, we go back again to the executive sponsor and we summarise results before effectively handing back over to the business. For example, you might get to the end of a set of coaching and the business has recognised that fantastic progress has been made. The progress may be so good (as can often be the case), that the individual gets promoted.
At this point, the individual probably then needs more coaching for their new role and new expectations. And with the relationship and the sponsored coaching structure in place, it means it can work very easily and very naturally, but all the time with measured results.
The greatest advantage of all, however, is that this sort of coaching supports the development of internal people. We are finding more and more businesses are supporting senior leaders with executive coaching because they want to progress them to board level, and with measurable results they can get them there with confidence.
If you’d like to know more about sponsored coaching and how it could benefit your senior leaders and your business, get in touch with The Leadership Coaches and we can arrange for a short call to share more about this approach.
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