There are 53,300 professional coaches worldwide who generate $2.356 billion U.S. dollars in revenue globally (2016 ICF Global Coaching Study), and that number is growing rapidly. As the profession continues to grow, the issue of effectiveness and return on investment (ROI) is likely to become more important for coaches. In fact, when it comes to measuring the success of coaching, no metric is more important to top executives than the ROI.

Investing in people is not the same as investing in a piece of equipment or any other tangible capital. For one thing, measuring the return on investment in a person is a bit more difficult than, say, measuring the increase in the number of products produced per hour by the new machine that has just been installed in the factory.

ICF-supported studies have indicated that almost all organizations state that they “know” coaching has been effective, but the evidence to support this is mostly anecdotal. Measuring the success of coaching was considered to be a challenge, and the methods used varied among the organizations. For the most part, coaching is measured at the performance level— “Changes in behavior” using 360-degree feedback programs and employee engagement/satisfaction surveys that could be linked back to those who had received coaching. But, most of these tools were readily available in the organization and were not designed specifically to measure the impact of coaching. Coaching professionals are not able to show the Value of coaching programs and justify coaching spend to their executives.

These top executive expectations are a challenge for coaching professionals and talent development professionals. The good news is that they can now meet these challenges with limited resources. Most organizations have the available resources to make it work. ROI Institute has developed a 10 easy steps for evaluating and measuring the value of coaching initiatives; the collective is called “ROI Methodology.” The ROI Methodology is the most widely used process to account for non-capital investments, but, more importantly, it is an approach to accountability through which program owners gather data that can be used to improve their processes as well. The 10 steps are as follow:

Step 1: Develop/Revise Coaching Objectives
Coaching objectives are developed based on needs:

Read more: https://coachingfederation.org/blog/10-easy-steps-for-proving-the-value-of-coaching