When I talk to other coaching leads there’s a few regular concerns that come up. Internal coaching is often seen as a good thing to have, but inferior to buying in external coaching from professional coaches. A bit of this comes from the history of how coaching has been used at different levels of seniority in the Public and Private sector in the UK. 

It’s really commonplace for members of the board of directors to have access to executive coaching, at top-tier rates from large consulting firms, in which they can confidentially pick through what’s on their plate and how they could negotiate their path through a tricky modern landscape as effectively as possible and in a way that is truly authentic to their values. There’s really good external coaches out there. We have a close relationship at work with several coaches who provide supervision for our internal coaches and coaching for high level board members, providing distance between the staff and the board for extra reassurance about confidentiality. It’s also true that I’ve come across quite a few professional coaches who are still finding their feet, and less experienced than the ones on my internal network.

Internal coaching, when I started out, was often used and offered by HR as a last gasp tool for people going through poor performance. By that stage it could be difficult to embed the changes in habits that were needed within the time frames available. If we were brought in early enough to nip issues in the bud, then there was a chance, but it ran the risk of anyone having coaching in the general workforce being seen to be ‘failing’ by association.

Thankfully, the world has moved on from those days, helped by the advocacy of senior managers who have found their own coaching really useful. But coaching training isn’t cheap, particularly in the time the course takes and the time away from the core job. There’s a lot of soul searching about gathering metrics to justify and quantify the value that internal coaching delivers, yet many of the ways in which coaching impact is traditionally recorded are entrenched in the lens of coaching being a formal 1-2-1 relationship and fail to get to the heart of the unique benefits that internal coaching brings (for which I’m a huge advocate), so I’ll try to bring that out here.

External coaching can be beyond the training budget of many organisations, with its pricing pitched to executive level work or hothousing talent development schemes. It can still be great value for money, but raises the bar for entry in a way that makes it hard for firms to offer coaching to all staff. The value of having great coaches available on tap, to anyone, at any grade, at any time that they need it, is priceless to organisations who are looking to excel at what they do. Having staff who can provide top notch coaching, and having staff who can access it quickly when they need to, has been shown to improve performance of teams, staff retention and the satisfaction of employees. 

Embedding these skills throughout the organisation has a whole variety of additional lateral advantages that are often overlooked. The primary thing I see in organisations with mature, motivated, internal coaching networks in place is the way in which those skills permeate out from having people using those skills as part of their everyday work. Coaching from managers is a really powerful way of role modelling how to structure conversations to ensure that they’re on point, that the views and deep knowledge of the staff working on the coalface are properly considered when decisions are made at higher levels, and also those staff experiencing it build the ability to have similar conversations in their day to day work too. This cascade effect helps to ensure that the business has the absolute best information with which to work from and that the staff are empowered to take the decisions closer and quicker to where the impact bites.

It’s a complex world and the old structures in which a manager would have all the answers and would tell people they manage exactly what they should be doing, and be involved in every decision made are impractical. In my day job, I manage people with doctorates in the technical areas they work and decades of applying that knowledge. It would be crazy, and impossible, for me to try and match the expertise of every member of the team. What I am in a position to do is to have an overview of the unusual issues that arise and help resolve these. To do this I need to gain a really deep understanding of the bones of the issues (using my coaching skills). Getting under the skin of the context, getting a clear understanding of where the sticking point is, making the most of all those years of experience that my team has accumulated is how I can be most effective as a manager. The alternative is to become the pinch point through which decisions funnel, a single point of failure which hampers the team’s ability to get on with their roles. Cultures like this suck the autonomy of the teams within it, and hamper the organisation as a whole. It’s empowering to be trusted in your judgement, to be asked what your views are in your work and to understand that your work and abilities are valued and appreciated.

Internal coaches offer staff at junior levels the sounding board to really plan out where they want to go next in their career (which is a brilliant way to retain the people you’ve worked hard to train, and to help grow the organisation’s institutional knowledge). They can be accessed in a frictionless way. If you have coaches in the business and to hand, they’re never ‘off duty’. They are using those skills in the little conversations they have in the corridors and tea points, in the five minutes at the start of a Teams meeting while other people dialling in are sorting out their sound and video issues. It’s a skillset that is utilised in everything they do. 

By coaching people in different parts of the business you’re also indirectly boosting the understanding, at ground level, of the challenges that the organisation is facing. Large businesses often talk about the issues of silo mentality between different departments. This is often spawned and exacerbated by lack of natural touching points and failure for people to really understand the context that they’re each working in. 

I have a tendency to get a bit soap boxy on the advantages of in-house coaching, but that has stemmed from seeing the benefits. We’ve saved vast sums of money by retaining skilled  staff by unlocking their career progress, helping them identify and develop the skills and abilities to reach their potential. They’ve been able to improve their confidence, to dispel their imposter syndrome and ultimately work at their best. Unlocked by having in-house coaching on tap, at minimal cost to the organisation.

Training up in-house coaches rapidly pays back the cost of entry. Having those skills in the building is absolutely priceless to any business looking to succeed in the modern world.

In my opinion, naturally.