500% return on investment decision making: A coaching program for tech success

This article delves into the nuances of tech leadership coaching, particularly focusing on extensions to the GROW model. It emphasizes the importance of tailoring coaching approaches to the specific needs of tech professionals, especially those in leadership roles. The article highlights the unique challenges and opportunities faced by tech leaders and how coaching can help them overcome obstacles and achieve their goals. It also discusses the importance of a strong coach-coachee relationship and the benefits of a customized approach. Ultimately, the article aims to provide insights into the power of effective coaching in driving individual and organizational success in the tech industry. #techleadership, #leadershipcoaching, #executivecoaching, #careercoaching, #professionaldevelopment, #techindustry, #productmanagement, #engineeringleadership, #designleadership, #personalgrowth

Several product leaders have asked me questions about leadership coaching over the past few weeks. What exactly do I mean by leadership coaching? How might coaching apply to various tech companies? Who would most benefit from the coaching? How is success measured? What differences exist from agile coaching, career coaching, wellness coaching, communications coaching, therapy and other similar professional services? This week’s article answers these questions.

Figure 1 illustrates a program that I use at Tech Success Coaching. It’s essentially the ‘gold standard’ GROW model introduced by John Whitmore, Graham Alexander, Max Landsberg, and Alan Fine in the 1990s [1, 2], with adaptations and customizations for contemporary tech company needs, such as servant leadership management styles, system thinking, and rapid iterative product development processes – all based on my first-hand experiences as a product leader at various tech companies in the past. The core GROW framework stands for Goals, Realities, Options, and Way forward. The GROW model is based on evidence that decision performance can often be improved with little or no additional knowledge. Thus, a good coach who asks carefully structured questions can typically facilitate a coachee leader to unlock challenging decisions. Significant return on investment (ROI) results exceeding 500% are typically observed for such leadership coaching activities (e.g.,  Anderson’s [4] results of 529% ROI and McGovern et al.’s [5] results of 570% ROI).

Figure 1:  A typical coaching program used at Tech Success Coaching

I broadly define technology as applied scientific knowledge for business gain. Because my technical background is in Computer Science and Engineering Science, I focus most work with leaders at software and hardware technology companies – typically with mid- to senior-level product, design, or engineering leaders. However, the coaching program works equally well in other technology domains such as biotechnology or chemistry technology. Unlike advising or mentoring, coaching focuses on asking carefully constructed questions to elicit a coachee’s innate know-how. In other words, I leverage my unique technical and business background to ask better questions as a coach – not give advice.

Coaches vary in the amount of structure that they use. Many coaches use a similar highly structured program for dozens or hundreds of coachees. This coaching approach has advantages including the ability to (i) scale rapidly across a large organization, (ii) budget within a modest cost per coachee, and (iii) apply uniformly & consistently among many leaders at the same organization. This is the default coaching paradigm taught by most business schools. At the other extreme, a customized approach can be tailored for each coachee leader. This more customized approach works particularly well with servant leadership, and similar management styles common in technology organizations, where leaders have much individual agency and therefore unique needs. 

This more customized approach is the focus of the Tech Success Coaching Program shown in Figure 1. The process starts with a leader who is challenged by a sensitive, important decision that they need to make. Because the coaching program involves resolving decisions incorporating both people and technical constraints, coachees typically are leaders with some kind of people-management responsibility. However, coaching can be helpful for senior individual contributors, such as a principal engineer or scientist, to best champion their work with key stakeholders such as the C-Suite or product managers. All steps of the coaching program have a focus on recurring one-on-one sessions where the coach asks questions in response to deep listening of the coachee. "Great coaches sniff out hidden truths. They tend to be curious and ask penetrating questions" [3]. 

Consultation:  The first step in the coaching program is for the coachee to assess whether the coach is a good fit for them and their situation. Unlike therapy, which is highly regulated, coaching is (currently) unregulated. It’s difficult to assess whether a coach will be a good fit based on credentials. Stratford Sherman and Alyssa Freas note that, “Perhaps the most important qualifications are character and insight, distilled as much from the coach’s personal experience as from formal training… Pay close attention to chemistry and the matching of coach to coachee. In certain situations, a coach’s doctorate degree, or prior experience as a CEO, or background in psychology may indeed be highly relevant.” [3] Coaching activities are often referred to as “development”. Because of confusion between personal human development and technical engineering development, I focus on the word “decision” for each project. By “decision”, I mean an actionable decision-making project that has been successfully executed in a measurable way. A consultation needs to address three main criteria:  (i) clear intentions of the coaching program, including links to business imperatives, (ii) qualifications of the coach to meet the coachee’s needs, including experience, trust, and chemistry, and (iii) resourcing, including dedicated time, money, and personal support network. Consultations are typically free, 20 - 30 minute sessions.

Goal:  This step involves discussing and clearly defining a goal, including measures of success. Discussion of actionable decisions that are most sensitive and challenging are particularly helpful to focus and define goals. Goals can typically be sufficiently defined within 1-3 sessions of 50-80 minutes.

Assessment:  This step involves ideating and mapping out the current realities that are constraining the goal. Constraints include people, tools, and processes. The step focuses on a non-judgmental identification of potential “as is” and “to be” constraints and context related to the goal(s). In other words, the “as is” and “to be” mappings are analogous to the “Realities” and “Options”, respectively, in the base GROW coaching model.  This assessment step in the Tech Success Coaching program differs from many typical business coaching assessment steps in two ways. First, the approach focuses on a customized, system thinking assessment intended to uncover deep and complicated patterns of people + technology. This differs from a focus on personality assessments like DiSC or technical checklist or survey assessments seen in most coaching programs. Second, the assessment is assumed to be an active, changeable set of attributes and relationships to better fit the agile, iterative environments of high-performing technology organizations. This differs from a focus on rigid assessments used in many other coaching contexts. Assessments can typically be sufficiently defined within 1-5 sessions of 50-80 minutes.

Activity:  This step involves taking specific actions, monitoring, and measuring the outcomes until the goal has been achieved or a pivot is deemed necessary. This is analogous to the “Way forward” in the GROW model. Unlike most traditional coaching paradigms, the Tech Success Coaching Program has an emphasis on more quickly moving to “doing” activities with an openness to change – again to fit the more iterative, agile practices in top technology organizations. Activities can typically be monitored within 2-10 sessions of 50-80 minutes.

Retrospective:  This step involves noting what worked well and what were challenges during the particular decision-making project iteration. As in the previous steps, this includes behaviors of people and technical details, as well as the dynamics of the coaching process.  It’s also an opportunity to wrap up in a clean way and set up for future engagements. Retrospectives often include some kind of documentation of successes and challenges (both qualitative and quantitative) to help convey and support the positive growth of the coachee leader within their organization as well as their broader professional community. A retrospective can typically be run within 1-2 sessions of 50-80 minutes.

In total, a complete coaching iteration project will typically last between 6-18 sessions over the course of 3-12 months. Even with projects involving a small number of sessions, irregular spacing of sessions over time may increase value and effectiveness. For example, 1-2 “Assessment” sessions might be best performed in rapid succession over 2 days or 2 weeks whereas some “Activity” sessions or a “Retrospective” session might be best separated by up to 1-3 months to allow the people & technology topics discussed in a particular session to fully play out.

[1] Whitmore, J. (2009a) [1992]. Coaching for performance: GROWing human potential and purpose: the principles and practice of coaching and leadership. People skills for professionals (4th ed.). Boston: Nicholas Brealey. ISBN 9781857885354.

[2] Alexander, G. (2010) [2006]. Behavioural coaching—the GROW model. In Passmore, Jonathan (ed.). Excellence in coaching: the industry guide (2nd ed.). London; Philadelphia: Kogan Page. pp. 83–93. ISBN 9780749456672.

[3] Sherman, S., & Freas, A. (2004). The wild west of executive coaching. Harvard business review, 82(11), 82-93.

[4] Anderson, M.C. (2001). Executive briefing: Case study on the return on investment of executive coaching.  Retrieved 7 November, 2024, from: https://gvasuccess.com/articles/ExetutiveBriefing.pdf

[5] McGovern, J., Lindemann, M., Vergara, M., Murphy, S., Barker, L. & Warrenfeltz, R. (2001). Maximising the impact of executive coaching: Behavioural change, organisational outcomes, and return on investment. The Manchester Review, 6, 1–9.