The opportunity to regularly measure the heartbeat and other vitals of your organisation could be right under your nose, with little or no additional cost and benefits that could be life-saving.  To maximise reservoirs of Organisational Development knowledge, host regular feedback sessions with your Coaches and Coach Supervisors.

It is common practice to regularly check our health markers with our General Practitioners, measuring vital signs for good health, or indicators of trouble brewing.

Similarly the pulse of your Organisation can be taken regularly through healthy feedback loops with your Coaches or Coach Supervisors. This valuable organisational health check provides vital information on organisational health markers. These markers can be set at the outset and measured pre and post coaching, with midterm checks. Themes and trends emerge from months of coaching relationships, providing an invaluable sense of the mood, spirit and challenges in an organisation. Employee engagement surveys, staff retention stats, performance appraisal reports are optimally complemented by regular snapshots of your Coaching Health Barometer©, all the while maintaining full client confidentiality.

I had the recent pleasure of coaching and evaluating the experience of 15 Senior Management Team members from a global business, working across 5 countries. Over and above individual coaching goals, we measured 20 leadership markers, pre and post coaching. On average, almost 30 % improvement was experienced across the team across these markers, after only 6 coaching sessions each.

Secondly, all 15 clients reported on good to significant shifts against the following areas, over and above their specifically chosen coaching goals –

1. Self-Awareness
2. Professional Awareness
3. Team Cohesion
4. Daily effectiveness
5. Strategic Perspective
6. Confidence & Wellness
7. Communication
8. Work Life Balance

Thirdly the narrative evaluation shared stories of significant change across personal and professional realms.

A powerful spin-off of the process was the consolidation of learning through reflection process during evaluation. This deepened the learning and modelled the essence of reflective leadership and action learning. The cherry on top was discussing the findings in the final report with the team at the International Office, with new insights and recommendations emerging for future work. Trends, shifts, patterns, were clearly observed and together with the client, we realised that without this intensive process, these vital organisational health markers would have been missed.

Time to action your Coaching Health Barometer in 2016?

Tags: action learning, coach supervision, Coaching results, employee engagement, feedback, Leadership development, leadership markers, organisational development, refelctive leadership