Technology is an enabler. It enables you to be more effective and efficient; and to make informed decisions. Your coaching strategy will lead you to the kind of technology you need to underpin it.
You can see the full blueprint for Creating a Coaching Culture here.
Working through the coaching strategy blueprint, you might use technology in the following areas:
Technology and Coaching Measurement strategy
- Tracking your metrics over time, comparing the results year on year, coach by coach etc, to inform decisions about what to do differently
- Analysing trends in leading and lagging measures, as well as ROI
- Creating a balanced scorecard for an internal coaching function, that measures not only value to the organisation and to the coachees, but also the financials, the learning and growth of the coaches/other people in the team, and the efficacy of the business processes
- more qualitatively, capturing stories and case studies from coachees, that shows the human side of change and the impact it has on the individual
Technology and Coaching Roles
It goes without saying that those people who are managing coaching in an organisation will need laptops and phones to do their work! What other technology do they need? Conference calling facilities for 3-way contracting? Skype or equivalent (though I don’t think that broadband is stable enough in many areas to avoid the distractions caused by low bandwidth)? Headsets for hands-free coaching? etc etc
Technology and Coaching Processes
How can technology automate some of the coaching processes to make it easier for coach and coachee to keep track of progress? It could be useful if a coachee could enter their coaching goals into a website, for example, and then be reminded to go back into the website to review their progress against those goals before every coaching session. They could use the website to outline the issue for their next session, and the actions they decide to take coming out of that session. Coach and coachee can review progress against those actions at the start of the next session. This keeps everything in one place, with easy access for both parties. I’ve seen something like this for post course action planning and progress tracking, so why not for coaching? Saves a few trees, by taking away the need to use paper too.
The outcomes at the end might then be fed into the metrics site above (anonymously of course). This is the downside of using technology for this – some coachees are sceptical that putting something into a website will actually remain their property and not the property of the company. That confidentiality would have to be totally clear; and never fed into any performance management processes.
Technology and coach matching
If your strategy is to match coaches with coachees, then some kind of database might be appropriate to facilitate finding the right match – not that I think that technology can replace the human relationship, but having a simple way to search by location or qualification can be useful, especially if your pool of coaches is large.
Technology and Coaching Supervision
Coaching supervision can occur virtually, just as coaching can. If it’s 1-1 supervision, that is pretty straight-forward – a phone or skype. If it’s group supervision, it might be a conference call facility or a web-based programme.
Technology and harvesting the learning
You could use survey technology to gather themes from coaches. Ideally, it would be most efficient to have some kind of technology that creates a report coming out of that, as there may be a lot of data to analyse, depending on the extent of the coaching that occurs.
Technology and habit forming
More on this in next week’s blog!
