Coaching in the workplace isn’t working the way it should.
At least, not for most teams.
Over the last decade, workplaces have changed dramatically. Teams are more distributed. Change is relentless. Employees want more support—but they aren’t getting the coaching they need to grow.
And yet, many organizations still approach coaching like they did in 2010.
- Coaching is reserved for executives while managers and employees miss out on meaningful development.
- Coaching happens outside of daily work, making it difficult for employees to apply what they learn.
- Managers are expected to carry the full weight of coaching—without enough support or tools to make it sustainable.
Leaders aren’t ignoring coaching. They’re investing in it, making time for it, and trying to do it well. But despite those efforts, coaching often feels inconsistent, unsustainable, or limited in impact.
It’s not because coaching isn’t valuable. It’s because the way it’s being delivered isn’t built for today’s workplace.
Instead of coaching being event-based, time-bound, and exclusive, it needs to be woven into everyday interactions—accessible to everyone when they need it most.
To make that shift, coaching needs to:
- Reach beyond leadership circles and become a company-wide practice.
- Happen in the moments that matter—before key conversations, during collaboration, and as challenges arise.
- Be scalable—so coaching isn’t another burden on HR or managers but a shared practice that strengthens teams.
Coaching shouldn’t feel like adding more work. It can be your team’s most valuable tool—when it’s done differently.
👉 So, what needs to change? Let’s break it down.
See How Cloverleaf Scales Coaching In The Workplace
Why Coaching Is Different From Other Management Strategies & Why It Is More Effective
Workplace challenges today aren’t the same as they were 10 years ago. But most leadership coaching models haven’t changed to match them.
Managers are expected to motivate, engage, and grow their teams, but they’re still being taught an outdated approach:
Management is about control, while coaching is about discovery.
- The old-school management model is directive—leaders assign tasks, monitor progress, and correct mistakes.
- Coaching, on the other hand, encourages employees to explore solutions, ask questions, and take ownership.
Managing focus on execution while coaching builds problem-solvers.
Coaching leads to success because it facilitates psychological capital, a positive psychological resource that coachees can apply to their day-to-day work experiences. – psychologytoday.com
- Management ensures work gets done. Coaching ensures employees know how to think through challenges independently.
- In today’s fast-moving, constantly shifting workplace, employees need to be adaptable, not just productive.
Coaching must evolve beyond a top-down model.
- Coaching shouldn’t just be a leader-to-employee activity—teams grow best when development happens across all levels, not just when managers make time for it.
- Relying solely on managers for coaching slows down team development and prevents employees from learning alongside one another.
What’s the shift?
Coaching should be a shared team practice—accessible to everyone, not just leaders, and embedded into daily work rather than relying solely on managers to drive it.
Why 2010-Era Coaching Is Holding Your Team Back
Coaching has always been a valuable part of leadership and team development. But in many organizations, it hasn’t evolved alongside the workplace itself.
Teams operate differently than they did a decade ago—communication is faster, collaboration is more fluid, and challenges emerge in the moment. Yet, many companies still use program models that don’t match today’s realities.
Instead of helping teams grow together, coaching often is:
- Exclusive – Reserved for executives and high-potential employees, leaving most managers and team members without meaningful support.
- Disconnected from daily work – Delivered through workshops, quarterly reviews, or one-off training sessions that quickly fade from memory.
- Overly dependent on managers – Coaching is framed as a leadership responsibility rather than an organization-wide practice.
It’s not that these methods never worked—it’s that they were built for a different kind of workplace.
Three Major Gaps in Traditional Coaching
1. It’s Exclusive—Only Leaders Get Coached
Most coaching is designed for senior executives or “high-potential” employees. Managers and employees—who would benefit the most—are left without meaningful development opportunities.
- The problem: When coaching is limited to a select few, teams lose out on daily opportunities for growth.
- The impact:
- 68% of managers have never received formal leadership training, leading to misalignment, disengagement, and poor team performance.
- Employees receive little to no coaching unless they are identified as high-potential, which can lead to a lack of motivation and unclear career development.
2. It’s Disconnected—Training Happens Away from Real Work
Most coaching and leadership training happens in scheduled sessions or offsite programs. But by the time employees return to their day-to-day work, much of what they learned is forgotten or never applied.
- The problem: Coaching is treated as an event rather than something employees can apply in their daily roles.
- The impact:
- 90% of what people learn in training is forgotten within a month without reinforcement.
- Employees lack support when they need it most—before key conversations, during challenges, or when giving feedback.
3. It Overloads Managers—Too Much Pressure, Not Enough Support
Managers are expected to drive all coaching and development for their teams, yet they are already juggling multiple responsibilities. Without the right tools and shared accountability, coaching becomes another overwhelming task.
- The problem: When coaching is only a manager’s responsibility, it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
- The impact:
- Managers struggle to balance coaching with other demands, leading to inconsistent application.
- Employees don’t receive consistent feedback or growth opportunities because coaching isn’t built into the team’s daily interactions.
Coaching is meant to unlock potential—but when it’s tied to outdated structures, that potential stays untapped.
If coaching isn’t embedded in how teams work together every day, it becomes another initiative instead of a real driver of growth.
So, what does modern, scalable coaching look like?
Let’s break it down.
The Future of Coaching in the Workplace: Scalable, Embedded, and Team-Driven
Workplace coaching is at an inflection point. Organizations are investing more in coaching than ever before—yet many employees still aren’t receiving the development they need.
A recent study found that 9 out of 10 companies plan to increase their investment in coaching over the next 12 months. But if coaching remains exclusive, disconnected from daily work, and overly reliant on managers, those investments won’t create the lasting impact organizations expect.
Coaching isn’t just an HR initiative or a leadership skill—it should be a shared, everyday practice that strengthens teams at every level.
What Needs to Change?
For coaching to drive real results, it must move beyond traditional approaches that limit its reach and effectiveness. Here’s what needs to happen:
- Coaching must be available to every employee, not just a select few. Too often, coaching is reserved for senior leaders or high-potential employees, leaving the majority of the workforce without meaningful development.
- It must be part of daily work—not something that happens in training rooms or scheduled sessions. Coaching that only occurs in structured programs often fails to translate into long-term behavior change.
- It must be shared—coaching isn’t something managers should have to carry alone. When employees learn how to coach and support each other, development becomes a continuous, team-driven process.
A recent Harvard Business Review article reinforces this shift, advocating for leaders to act as coaches and integrate development into daily interactions rather than treating it as a separate function.
How Coaching Must Evolve
Many organizations recognize the need for coaching but are still using outdated strategies. Here’s what’s changing:
- From Leadership-Only → Teamwide Development
- Coaching should extend beyond managers to become a team practice that helps everyone improve.
- From Generalized Training → Personalized, Context-Aware Coaching
- Employees need coaching that is relevant to their work, strengths, and challenges—not just one-size-fits-all advice.
- From Training Events → Coaching in the Flow of Work
- Development needs to happen in the moment, guiding employees before key conversations, collaboration, or decision-making.
Organizations that make these shifts will create a workplace where coaching isn’t just an occasional intervention—it’s a continuous driver of team success.
Coaching That Fits Today’s Workplace
Coaching doesn’t have to be another task on a manager’s plate or a one-off training initiative. It can be woven into how teams work, learn, and grow together.
Companies that embrace scalable, embedded coaching will see stronger teams, greater agility, and a workforce that continuously improves—without adding to the burden of HR or leadership.
How to Make Coaching Scalable, Personalized, and Embedded in Workflows
To truly transform coaching in the workplace, organizations need a strategy that makes development accessible, relevant, and ongoing.
That means moving beyond traditional coaching models and embracing a scalable, personalized, and embedded approach that allows coaching to happen naturally throughout the workday.
Here’s how to make that shift:
1. Shift from Manager-Led Coaching to Teamwide Development
When managers are the only ones expected to drive coaching, it limits how often development happens and puts unnecessary pressure on them.
Instead, coaching should be something that happens across the team in everyday interactions.
- Employees learn how to coach each other—providing feedback, support, and development beyond just manager interactions.
- Managers serve as facilitators rather than the sole source of coaching—making team development more sustainable.
- Teams build a culture where growth and learning happen in the moment, not just in structured sessions.
When coaching is shared across the team, employees take more ownership of their development—leading to stronger collaboration, problem-solving, and continuous growth.
2. Embed Coaching in Daily Tools & Workflows
Coaching is most effective when it happens in the moment—before a critical conversation, during a challenge, or when an employee is struggling with feedback.
Yet, most coaching happens outside of the flow of work, making it difficult to apply when it matters most.
- Coaching insights are delivered directly through the tools employees use every day (for instance, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email, Calendar).
- Instead of waiting for formal coaching sessions, employees receive personalized guidance right before key interactions—helping them apply learning instantly.
- Coaching becomes part of daily work, eliminating the need for extra meetings or long training sessions.
When coaching is embedded into daily workflows, employees don’t have to “find time” for development—it happens seamlessly as they work.
3. Automate Personalized Coaching to Make It Scalable
One of the biggest challenges with coaching is scalability. Many organizations struggle to provide consistent, high-quality coaching to every employee because coaching has traditionally required time-consuming, manual efforts.
Technology powered coaching changes that.
- Automated coaching insights provide personalized, context-aware guidance for every team member—without requiring more from managers.
- Employees receive just-in-time nudges that help them develop leadership, communication, and collaboration skills in their daily roles.
- Coaching becomes scalable across the entire organization, ensuring every employee has access to meaningful development.
By automating coaching that is personalized and relevant, organizations can provide continuous development without adding administrative burden.
When coaching is:
Shared across the team (not just led by managers),
Embedded into daily workflows (not isolated to training sessions), and
Made scalable with automation (not limited by HR resources),
…it becomes an organic, ongoing part of team success.
When coaching is built into the way teams work—not treated as a separate initiative—it strengthens collaboration, deepens trust, and drives measurable performance improvements across the organization.
How Teams Experience Coaching Differently With Cloverleaf
Most coaching happens in moments that are too little, too late. A leadership workshop here. A quarterly review there. A training session that sounds good in theory but never sticks in practice.
And then, employees are left to figure it out on their own—without support, without reinforcement, and without a way to apply what they’ve learned when it actually matters.
It’s not that organizations don’t want to coach better. It’s that traditional coaching structures aren’t built for the way work happens today. Cloverleaf makes coaching a continuous, integrated part of team growth—not something separate from the work itself.
Coaching Can Be a Daily Practice, Not a Leadership Perk
In many organizations, coaching is reserved for leadership development programs—positioned as something “extra” rather than essential. That means only a handful of employees ever experience it in a meaningful way.
Cloverleaf flips this model. Instead of coaching being locked away in executive training, it’s woven into the way teams work every single day.
- No applications. No waiting for the next workshop. No limited access. Every employee gets coaching insights designed for their role, their strengths, and the way they collaborate with others.
- Development moves from leadership training to a team-wide skill. Employees don’t just get coached; they learn how to coach each other—strengthening team trust and collaboration.
Coaching should amplify team dynamics, not just individual performance. When everyone is part of the process, teams move faster, make better decisions, and work together more effectively.
Coaching That Happens When It Matters Most—Not After the Fact
Coaching programs can suffer from poor timing. Employees learn something in a training session but don’t apply it for weeks—or worse, forget it entirely.
With Cloverleaf, coaching happens in the moment when people actually need it.
- Before a big meeting? Cloverleaf delivers insight on how to communicate more effectively with each teammate.
- Navigating a difficult conversation? Get guidance on how to frame feedback constructively.
- Leading a cross-functional project? Cloverleaf helps teams anticipate collaboration challenges before they derail progress.
This isn’t about dumping more information onto employees—it’s about giving them exactly what they need, when they need it.
Growth doesn’t happen in scheduled sessions. It happens in real work moments. Cloverleaf makes sure coaching is there when it counts.
Managers Get Support—Instead of Carrying the Entire Weight of Coaching
Managers know they need to develop their teams, but most aren’t given the support to do it well. They’re expected to coach, give feedback, manage team dynamics, and drive results—all on top of their own responsibilities.
Cloverleaf removes the coaching bottleneck by making team development a shared responsibility:
- Managers get real-time insights into how their team works best together. Instead of guessing how to motivate or support their people, they get coaching prompts tailored to individual and team strengths.
- Teams take an active role in their own development. Employees aren’t waiting on their managers to facilitate growth—they’re actively engaging in coaching insights that help them collaborate, communicate, and problem-solve better.
- Coaching becomes embedded in team culture. Instead of being another task for managers, it’s a natural part of how teams work together.
When coaching is shared across a team, it doesn’t just lighten the load on managers—it strengthens the entire organization.
Why Organizations Are Moving to Cloverleaf
For coaching to create lasting impact, it has to be more than a program—it has to be part of the way teams operate.
That’s exactly what Cloverleaf delivers.
- Scalable coaching that reaches every employee, not just leadership.
- Personalized insights tailored to each person’s work style, strengths, and role.
- Timely guidance that helps employees navigate work challenges in the moment.
- A shift from manager-led development to a team-wide coaching culture.
The workplace has changed. Coaching should too.
How Technology Helps Leaders and Teams Develop Stronger Coaching Practices
Coaching is about asking the right questions, at the right time, in a way that drives real learning and growth. But for many leaders, coaching feels like something they should do rather than something they feel equipped to do effectively.
Technology bridges this gap by making coaching a natural, structured, and ongoing part of leadership and teamwork. Instead of leaving leaders to figure it out on their own, micro coaching tools provide the right coaching prompts, at the right moments, to help teams grow together.
Here’s how technology helps leaders and team members develop and apply better coaching skills in everyday work:
1. Coaching Conversations That Happen When They Matter Most
Great coaching starts with great questions. But in the middle of a fast-paced workday, most leaders don’t have time to stop and think, What’s the best coaching question to ask right now?
How technology helps:
✅ Personalized coaching prompts before one-on-one meetings, performance check-ins, or feedback conversations.
✅ Digital coaching can suggest the right coaching question based on the employee’s goals, strengths, and challenges.
✅ Real-time nudges reminding leaders to ask questions that spark meaningful reflection—before important conversations, not after.
📌 Example: Before a manager’s 1:1 with a direct report, a coaching tool like Cloverleaf could suggest:
Your team member has been working on improving their communication in meetings. Try asking: ‘What’s one thing you did differently in today’s meeting that worked well?’
Why it works: Instead of relying on memory or instinct, managers get structured guidance to make their coaching more effective.
2. Scaling the Coaching Habit Across Entire Teams
Coaching needs to be a team practice to truly transform a workplace. However, most employees don’t naturally think of coaching each other, and many managers feel like they have to carry the weight of coaching alone.
How technology helps:
✅ Team-wide coaching insights that encourage self awareness and emotional intelligence.
✅ Strength-based coaching insights that help employees understand how to collaborate more effectively based on each other’s personalities and work styles.
📌 Example: A team working on a high-stakes project receives a nudge in their Slack channel:
Before your next meeting, try asking each other: ‘What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing right now, and how can we support you?’
Why it works: Instead of waiting for managers to initiate coaching, teams learn to support each other in the flow of work.
3. Coaching That Adapts to Different Team Members
Not every employee responds to the same coaching style. Some thrive on direct, action-oriented coaching, while others need space for reflection. Coaching can feel frustrating for managers and employees without insight into how each person thinks, communicates, and solves problems.
How technology helps:
✅ Personality-based coaching insights that guide managers on how each team member prefers to receive feedback and coaching.
✅ Behavioral assessments integrated into coaching tools, helping leaders adapt their approach based on individual strengths.
✅ Situational coaching recommendations that adjust based on team dynamics.
📌 Example: Before providing constructive feedback, a manager receives a coaching insight:
Your team member prefers a solutions-oriented approach. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, try asking: ‘What’s one adjustment you can make next time?’
Why it works: Coaching becomes personalized and effective, rather than one-size-fits-all.
4. Reducing the Mental Load of Coaching
One of the biggest reasons leaders don’t coach more often? Cognitive overload. In fast-paced environments, coaching feels like just one more thing to remember—and when people are overwhelmed, they default to what’s easiest: giving directives instead of coaching.
How technology helps:
✅ Automated coaching prompts that eliminate decision fatigue, helping leaders focus on the conversation, not what to ask next.
✅ Seamless integration with daily workflows, so coaching becomes a natural extension of work—not an extra task.
✅ Data-driven insights that show progress over time, giving leaders confidence that their coaching is making a difference.
📌 Example: Instead of a manager scrambling to prepare for a feedback session, an automated coaching tool can provide a nudge like:
Your team member thrives on positive reinforcement and practical next steps. Instead of focusing solely on outcomes, try asking: ‘What part of your approach felt most effective? How can I support you in refining it further?’
Why it works: Leaders spend less time thinking about how to coach—and more time actually doing it.
Technology Doesn’t Replace Coaching—It Makes It Better
At its core, coaching is about human connection—helping people grow, solve problems, and reach their potential. Technology doesn’t replace that—it enhances it by making coaching more structured, more scalable, and more embedded in everyday work.
When leaders and teams have the right tools to support coaching conversations, they don’t just know what to do—they actually do it.
🚀 With coaching technology, every leader can become a great coach, and every team can build a culture of continuous learning.
In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, businesses constantly strive to improve employee performance and foster a motivating coaching culture. One emerging trend in achieving this goal is the use of Automated Coaching.
But why is Automated Coaching™ so valuable? As businesses aim to provide targeted and impactful coaching, they face challenges in developing effective training programs tailored to employees’ needs.
By leveraging data-driven insights and personalized coaching, organizations and teams can effectively identify skills gaps, develop tailored training programs, and drive learning and development initiatives aligning with organizational goals.
Let’s look at what Automated Coaching™ is and discover why it’s quickly becoming an essential component of leadership development in the modern workplace.
Key Takeaways:
👉 Despite numerous L&D initiatives, employee behavior is only modestly impacted.
👉 Optimized learning occurs when the experience is customized, integrated into the workflow, and available on demand.
👉 Automated Coaching™ offers relevant, real-time prompts for improved emotional intelligence, communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution.
👉 Employees require smaller, well-timed insights that can be processed and applied daily for growth.
👉 Automated Coaching™ can scale to provide development opportunities for all employees.
Take A Tour Of Automated Coaching In Action
Automated Coaching Is An Evolution in Self-Directed Growth and Development
Traditional coaching entails the dyadic relationship between coach and coachees, which involves a process of collaborative goal-setting, constructing solutions, and fostering the coachee’s self-directed growth.
With Automated Coaching™, the goal is pre-defined (i.e., enhancing self-awareness and other-awareness), and the automated coaching system generates solutions that foster the coachee’s self-directed growth.
In turn, Automated Coaching™ provides relevant, in-the-moment prompting and insight that individuals can directly apply to increase emotional intelligence, strengthen communication, identify opportunities for collaboration, and work through conflict successfully with teammates.
Cloverleaf uses assessment data to provide digital nudges to everyone within a team or organization to improve performance, increase managerial effectiveness, strengthen cross-functional collaboration, and inspire personal development.
A consolidated dashboard provides insights into employee strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. From validated personality and strengths assessments to daily coaching, this approach can help organizations improve collaboration, strengthen performance, and better understand the needs of their teams.
Get the full guide to Talent Development in the Age of AI. Empower your people to address conflict, strengthen collaboration, and create a culture of trust.
How Automated Coaching™ Revolutionizes Daily Growth and Development in the Workplace
One of the advantages of Automated Coaching™ is that it can be “pulled” at the coachees’ convenience and that it can be “pushed” every day, as many times as the system is programmed.
Unlike other L&D opportunities, Automated Coaching™ can facilitate coachee growth on a day-to-day basis. This approach aligns with several theories in organizational behavior.
Organizational Behavior Theories That Support Automated Coaching Strategies
1️⃣ According to social learning theory, human beings can only attend to, process, and retain a limited amount of information. Said differently, people can’t internalize information like super-computers. If organizations want their employees to grow, they must deliver smaller, digestible, well-timed insights that they can process and apply daily.
2️⃣ Research concerning clinical psychology on using “micro-interventions”–small and short interventions void of human contact–can help patients with anything from anxiety to addiction.
These microlearning interventions align with what’s called metacognitive prompt theory, which suggests that you can nudge people to be more aware of their situation through purposeful reflection, which leads to more heightened self-regulation and behavior change.
📊 Cloverleaf has researched this phenomenon, and the results are promising. The extent to which users engaged with the automated coaching program positively impacted several important outcomes, including:
👉 An enhanced desire to learn more about themselves and their work,
👉 Improved interactions with team members,
👉 And an overall better mood while at work.
The Problem with Traditional Learning and Development Initiatives
Leadership and development (L&D)—the process of helping employees increase performance and well-being in organizational settings—is a $366B industry.
L&D is everywhere, with larger organizations having in-house L&D departments/positions, Universities offering L&D-specific degrees (e.g., master’s degrees, executive education), dozens of the world’s largest consulting firms specializing in L&D offerings, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and solopreneurs engaging in L&D through individual and team-based coaching and consulting.
Despite the sheer magnitude of L&D interest and initiatives, meta-analytic evidence suggests that its impact on employee behavior is relatively modest.
The source of the issue is that learning and development typically manifest as a one-time initiative where participants are inundated with recommendations.
This approach is misaligned with the fact that human beings can only process and retain a limited amount of information in one setting. Further, L&D is typically delivered as a pre-packaged and static offering, which overlooks that individuals are different and that their priorities, careers, and lives are constantly in flux.
Research suggests that learning and behavior regulation are optimized when the experience is customized to users’ characteristics and needs, integrated within one’s workflow, and available on demand.
💡Human beings can’t accommodate these features at scale, but technology certainly can. Automated Coaching™ can make a substantial impact for talent leaders who want to change the culture and reach more people.
Is Your People Development Strategy Keeping Up?
See How Leading Teams Use Tech To Stay Ahead.
Will Automated Coaching™ Replace Or Support Traditional Coaching Practices?
Automated Coaching™ will supplement, not replace, traditional coaching. Prior research illustrates that, when done well, coaching increases coachee performance and well-being.
Automated Coaching™ gives coaches a more efficient method for staying connected with their coachees. It also gives them richer material to discuss with their coachees. In an ideal world, employees have access to both.
Unfortunately, many don’t experience the benefits of coaching, given the cost, lack of access, or time commitment. Technology can help close this gap by lowering costs and making coaching more scalable and widely available to diverse groups.
Is Automated Coaching™ The Same Thing As Artificial Intelligence?
Automated Coaching™ is broader than artificial intelligence (AI). However, where appropriate, AI can play a fundamental role in helping make Automated Coaching™ more adaptive and impactful.
We are far from “strong AI,” whereby machines are fully autonomous with general intelligence. Indeed, AI is making substantial process over the last decade, making it easier for organizations to incorporate into products like Automated Coaching™.
However, applying “weak AI,” whereby specific algorithms are embedded to solve particular problems, is more representative of what coaching and Automated Coaching™ have the potential to incorporate in the short term.
How Can Development Leaders Adapt To What’s Possible With Coaching for Today’s Workplace
Traditional coaching strategies have shortcomings that can be felt across an organization. However, scaling the development of team members is more tangible today.
As outlined here, there are four significant challenges to traditional coaching models that hinder their effectiveness in the workplace:
- It is often limited to the coachee’s perspective
- Providing a human coach is costly
- Relevance and timeliness are limited due to scheduling
- Proving impact that affects organizational results
As such, innovation is needed to address these challenges related to organizational training and development. Automated Coaching™ overcomes the challenges leaders are familiar with in delivering coaching to their employees.
Automated Coaching Technology Is:
✅ Scalable
✅ Timely
✅ Measurable
Unlike traditional coaching models, Automated Coaching™ can scale to increase access to development opportunities for everyone in an organization. This means that employee coaching is no longer limited to a select few but can widely extend throughout a company.
What’s more, Automated Coaching™ provides employees with a greater number of coaching moments than traditional practices.
Instead of relying on monthly sessions where individuals hopefully gather a handful of understanding, Automated Coaching™ integrates into the user’s workday to offer in-the-moment, relevant insights and tips.
Additionally, Automated Coaching™ offers a unique advantage in the form of user feedback, allowing individuals to provide input on the coaching tips they receive.
This immediate feedback response enables users to obtain better insights and more applicable coaching tailored to their specific growth. Therefore, Automated Coaching™ can adapt to the needs of each individual, making it a powerful tool for employee development and organizational performance.
A Powerful Tool For Collective People Development
As businesses seek new ways to streamline training and deliver impactful coaching, Automated Coaching™ provides a unique solution. With the ability to adapt to the specific needs of individuals, it is a powerful tool for employee development and organizational performance.
The future of leadership development lies in this customized, on-demand coaching that can enhance skills and increase performance, transforming the workplace for years to come.
The coaching industry is a dynamic and colorful industry. It has given us the likes of Tony Robbins, Marshall Goldsmith, and Sheila Goldgrab and helped millions of people discover who they are and how to succeed in whatever chapter of life they are in.
Though coaching has made its way into the mainstream and adopted new and innovative approaches to engaging with coachees, the model most coaches use to facilitate coaching moments hasn’t changed much in the past generation.
Most training and development resources still rely on information consumption models that are still susceptible to the forgetting curve hypothesis, which indicates that people’s memory, even of valuable information, will atrophy over time (and often very short periods of time) without good practices to retain it.
Plus, many assessment tools still use underlying research and analysis from Carl Jung and haven’t evolved much other than newer and fresher coats of paint (think colors instead of numbers, birds or animals instead of letters).
Even the coaching industry’s approach hasn’t changed much over the decades. Hourly sessions, at regular intervals, followed by the occasional check-in for accountability.
Valuable coaching conversations can lose momentum because they are confined to limitations familiar to common coaching approaches. However, in the moment coaching, especially within the workplace, is in greater demand and more relevant than ever.
Why Are Coaching Moments At Work So Valuable?
A coaching culture creates opportunities for managers and peers to help develop one another’s skills and performance.
Coaching is invaluable if an organization is to achieve its goals. It should be part of the continuous employee performance management by managers to maximize the potential of the employees. – quantic.edu
The benefits of a coach helping a team or individuals work through challenges can impact results that extend throughout the entire organization.
People are complex, and the best coaches consider context, realizing that every situation is different and requires nuance.
At Cloverleaf, we love coaches and believe strongly in the value they can provide to a team. But also believe it worth acknowledging that there are shortcomings to traditional coaching models that coaches and leaders need to consider.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
5 THINGS THIS FREE RESOURCE WILL TEACH YOU
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
3 Challenges To Traditional Coaching Models:
Scalability
- Providing a human coach for everyone in the organization is cost prohibitive, and finding or training enough available coaches is difficult. Not to mention that there are diminishing marginal returns if everyone had a coach.
Timeliness
- A once-a-month connection between an individual and their coach can restrict relevant, timely coaching specific to the immediate problems that managers, leaders, or individuals face throughout their days/months.
Measurable Impact
- Proving and improving impact has been a challenge for the industry.
Often, even the best coaching relationships may only make the coachee feel better that they are doing something to improve themselves. But what about the ability to verify clear, measurable outcomes that indicate organizational results?
Measurement is another critical area where there hasn’t been much innovation in coaching solutions. Solving these three significant problems requires defining the long-term goal of coaching in the workplace.
What Is The Goal Of A Coaching Moment?
When I ask people in our network about their experience with a coach, they will often recall the last coaching session and point to some insight or discovery gained during that session.
Next, I follow up with a question about frequency – specifically, how many of these insights they typically encounter during an average 1-hour session. They may pull out a notebook and reference 3-5 bullet points of takeaways.
Typically, to measure the impact of those 3-5 insights, one could consider several points of impact:
- Leadership effectiveness
- Performance reviews
- 360 scores
While these are important indicators, the measurable impact of the coaching is limited because they only reflect a point in time concerning the individual (often without ongoing measurement or prone to inconsistent measurement over time.)
Plus, there are several additional factors (pay, relationships, proximity to the work, etc.) that can skew the results.
There is room for improvement. At Cloverleaf, we have a North Star that guides our measurement of successful employee coaching to ensure it is precise and worthwhile. It also influences all the product features and market decisions we make.
We call this North Star – ‘Successful Coaching Moments.’
The goal of every coaching moment in the workplace should be to improve emotional intelligence, collaboration, and organizational impact.
To determine our proximity to reaching this North Star, we measure the following elements (like any good North Star metric):
Reach or breadth of people (known internally as coached users)
- This element reflects how many team members or employees within an organization are impacted by Cloverleaf’s Automated Coaching™.
Depth or levels of impact (known internally as successful coaching per day)
- Unlike most coaching practices that depend on the 3-5 insights gathered within a 1 hour per month session – Cloverleaf’s typical user experiences, on average, nine successful coaching moments per day.
Frequency (known internally as days coached per month)
- Cloverleaf can help you reach clients and teams daily. Rather than waiting weeks until the next coaching session, coaches can foster consistent development to keep their clients on track.
Measuring the reach, depth, and frequency of the coaching at work teams’ experience provides context that can ensure ongoing coaching in the workplace is happening and that users are less susceptible to pitfalls like the forgetting curve or slow progress.
At this point, the big question you may ask yourself is, ‘how do we know if in the moment coaching tips are successful?’
After all, that is the key to overcoming the current shortcomings of standard approaches to coaching and capturing true impact. Further still, how can we ensure that results are accurate and not impacted by several other factors? How do we PROVE that Automated Coaching™ is successful?
How To Know If Coaching Moments Are Successful Within Your Team
The best way to determine if coaching is successfully impacting your team is by using data that can indicate an increase in emotional intelligence, improvement in collaboration, and organizational performance.
Additionally, gaining a pulse on team culture and how applicable the coaching is can help leaders accurately assess the value of in the moment coaching.
With Cloverleaf, coachees can rate every piece of coaching content. With each coaching tip, we ask simple questions like, was this coaching helpful? This immediate feedback is a starting point for users to provide even more context concerning the effectiveness and relevance of the coaching they receive.
Next, team members can respond to additional contextual questions concerning why that coaching was helpful or unhelpful.
All of these data points are significant because they offer insight that correlates with the team and organizational sentiment, relevance to their role, and the ROI of Automated Coaching™.
The Big Question
The most important question is, how do we know that Automated Coaching™ improves emotional intelligence, team effectiveness, or belonging?
Cloverleaf’s Chief Research Officer, Scott Dust, runs regressions against the data to isolate the impact of Cloverleaf on outcomes, and here are some of the results.
Our monster pilot data essentially says that as the number of coaching moments increases, so does the increase in (a) team effectiveness, (b) feeling recognized by team members, and (c) feeling as if one’s strengths are valued by others.
These are great results, and we plan to further extend this analysis. We believe that Cloverleaf (an Automated Coaching™ solution) when used in conjunction with a human coach, can take employee and organizational development to even greater heights.
Cloverleaf is helping People Strategy Leaders change how they develop their leaders. Scaling coaching opportunities for leaders and managers is possible with access to popular validated assessments, personalized dashboards, and in-the-moment coaching tips.
