Welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn. I'm your host, Claire Pedrick, and what a pleasure it is to have you with us today. And I'm in the company of Jeremy Earnshaw, who sent me an email about evaluating coaching programs that sounded so interesting. I said, yeah, come and talk to us. So if you don't subscribe or follow The Coaching Inn on your podcast platform, do do that and you'll be able to get every episode as it drops.
And in the show notes is information about an exciting open live day at the Coaching Inn in March 2025. And we'd love you to come any time during the day to say hello at the Coaching Inn. So, Jeremy, how lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you Claire. Thank you so much for the invitation. Looking forward to having a chat. It's pleasure. So, I know you've got a thing, a good thing and a useful thing about evaluating coaching and what an amazing thing that is, because it's really important.
But just before we talk about that, tell us a bit about your own coaching journey. I and thanks for the invitation again. My coaching journey actually started way back in 1991, actually, when I was in the first throes of an executive career as a CFO. But I did actually some training for approximately three weeks out in Spain, actually. And I really enjoyed that learning experience, being engaged with individuals at the start of their careers.
Uh, and let that lie for probably 20 odd years whilst doing my financial career as a CFO. So I've done 25 years as a CFO, but all the time, was a, uh, an element of a burning ambition, Claire, to do something quite different. And I got more and more engaged with, uh, developing the younger talent within organizations, heading up lead programs where you would. work with 10 or 15 or so people within organizations to help them progress.
All the time with a background for me, Claire, of being quite fortunate in my career is that I've had lots of great experiences, some not so great, but it's led me to believe that coaching and mentoring can really stimulate people progressing in their own careers. So I did something about it. And I thought I'll not do the perhaps the simplest thing, which is to change my LinkedIn banner and become a coach. And I thought I'll do it properly.
I've got my, let's call it my professional experience, my I've walked in your shoes element, but I took myself off first of all, to do an Institute of Leadership and Management qualification in coaching and mentoring met some great people really enjoyed the cohort, the other individuals from many different walks of life. and professions. And then I followed that up with a master's degree at Newcastle University in coaching and mentoring as well.
And again, meeting some amazing people from all different kinds of organisations, public sector, private sector, management buyouts, academia, working with some great tutors, really enjoyed it. And then I took the decision that I wanted to stop my professional career as a CFO and become a full time coach. And that leads me to where we are today in being a full-time coach and mentor. How interesting.
And I love this combination, Jeremy, as you've gone through your career, of the people stuff that you talked about explicitly. But I'm also guessing, reporting, evaluating, counting the numbers, measuring the outcomes. and I, sorry, carry on Claire, yes. going to say what a beautiful thing that is to bring them both through at quite a volume.
I think there's probably, and I might be speaking somewhat out of turn, but I think there's probably a perception that anybody who has a kind of financial career is unable to blend working with people at the same time. There's this perception, I think, we, numbers-based people, we sit in the corner, we talk in our own special language of algebra and logarithms. We don't speak to anybody else. We don't engage with people.
And there's this perception that we can't move outside of the tram lines in terms of finance. And I think that's completely wrong. And I stand up, as opposed to my own profession in finance, by saying that finance people have got a lot to offer. And maybe there's a lot to learn for all kinds of professions as well. But yeah, that blend for me was really important.
And that's what I tried to take into my coaching career, which is not necessarily the most obvious blend, but for me it's about utilising all of the scars that you generate over 25 years around a boardroom table, that element of having walked in somebody's shoes, but also with the academic profession as well.
And still coming across the, I suppose the legacy opinion that's still there, and you will know this as well Claire, the legacy opinion that coaching and mentoring can be a little bit fluffy. It's not really for us. It's something that we don't really understand.
And that's really what pointed me towards the, can we provide some kind of framework to get over those challenges, let's say, of people saying, if I send people away to an away day or a strategy day and we do some outdoor activities, I can see what people are doing. doing that, I suppose what I would call the old fashioned things of leadership development and colleague development.
And I wanted to do something different and demonstrate that coaching and mentoring can be assessed and there are some metrics and there are some ways of developing and stimulating the kind of investment return, which I suppose people like me in my former career would have been wanting to see.
so interesting and I just wanted to pick up the thing that you said about 1991 and that that thread of of of the real personal faith development of others has also been that thread as you've been doing your other piece. I so, and I really enjoyed it. And I'd done informal coaching and mentoring. So I'll give you an example, actually. In one of my latter CFO roles, I joined, and it was an element of a, not necessarily a turnaround, but it was a business that had had some challenges.
And I inherited a rather unhappy group of people across quite a wide spread of disciplines as well. So not just finance, but corporate, legal, procurement, at some point HR as well. And I had a few people who I inherited and I thought were being hugely underutilized just through having one-to-ones with them and saying, what do you do? What are your challenges? What's stopping you? What would you like to do? How can you contribute to the organization, which will help you personally?
And I had two or three people in that organization who they couldn't really even describe what their title was at the time. But I thought they had huge potential. And people looked at me almost as if I had two heads when I said, I'm going to make A, B and C heads of or leaders of various departments. They were a little bit younger than other people in the organization at that level.
Fast forward a couple of years, they all did, and this is not really due to me, but it was their potential and all I did was unlock the door. And they did amazingly good jobs for me, even though I knew really that once they'd done a great job and demonstrated their potential, delivered on achievements and objectives, they would probably leave the organization and they did. but they all went on to fantastic careers. I'm still in contact with them now. This is 10 years ago.
They've had stratospheric progress in their careers. And all I did was say, can you do a bit more? What's stopping you? And that was a real thrill for me to be able to do that. And that's really what my coaching and mentoring is about as well by just... giving people the opportunity that I was very fortunate to have on a regular basis in my career. A lot of things went right.
Some things didn't quite go as well as other things as is normal in life, but to help people make that next step and progress. And it's why really my target coaching and mentoring audience is people going through that progression in their career. So aspirational people, People who might have joined a board at a level where perhaps they're experiencing a new sector, new disciplines, new people, and maybe there's that little bit to go.
A phrase I use, Claire, quite a lot is that I don't like people to get into this perception of perfection where you get promoted into a role in an organization and that's it. You've made it. There's nothing more to be achieved. And that expression of continuous learning, I think, can be a two-way thing. I did it. I did my master's degree at the age of 58. And if I can help people recognize that, do know what?
I might have become a director or a head of or something similar at a relatively young age, there's a lot more still to learn. So tell us about the measuring.
I did this and I chose this as my master's research project, which you may well be aware it's probably 12 months work from start to finish because you have to produce an idea with your tutors about something that preferably will be of benefit post master's degree, but also highly relevant, of course, to the work that you're doing on the master's degree. So I worked with my tutors who were fantastic at Newcastle University Business School. And I said, this is what I want to do.
I've done a very preliminary set of research reviews. And I don't think there is a consensus about the evaluation of leadership development and coaching and mentoring schemes. My tutor said, this is far too wide an issue, Jeremy, to even think about doing that. I said, I'm going to do it anyway. I'll listen to you in terms of cutting it down and making it slightly narrower.
But if I read the and did a very extensive literature review, what I found was, and this was the premise of doing the work, there's very little professional consensus about how to evaluate coaching mentoring schemes. There's very little academic. consensus either. all of the authors, Professor David Clutterbug has been on my own podcast, Professor Jonathan Passmore, these people still agree that there is very little consensus.
So I wanted to produce something that said, actually, we can at least provide a framework for evaluation. So I did the work. I actually did some what are called semi-structured interviews. So it allows you to probe some of the answers you get to the pre-prepared questions. I did it in an organization which happened to be a not-for-profit organization. So again, something that probably has a few challenges there in demonstrating that investment in this area is worth it.
And I did this over a period of time. I analyzed all of the work. I used various methods to consolidate. And I came up with six key themes about how to evaluate it. And they're probably in two sides of the sphere. So Claire, one element of the sphere was how can it be evaluated on an individual basis? How can it be evaluated through the organization? And how can it be seen to be providing benefits in customer service?
Three areas there, which probably edge towards scientific, technical, evaluation. So you can do control studies. You can assess the skills of people and how they are impacted by coaching and development. So three areas there which are impacted on the individual organization and customer service. I'll pause because I think you were just about to. Yes, absolutely. saying is that that side of the evaluation is evaluating through the lens of a system rather than an individual. Great.
the system there. Really important to mention the system. I have coaching and mentoring clients on an individual and an organizational basis. And the challenges in providing coaching to individuals without having an input into the system, as you mentioned, are quite significant on occasions where you can do as much as you can, but if the team or the system isn't helping that, it can be a real challenge as well.
So I think the three areas, and these are the themes which were consistent from my interviewees. So a real section, which is I can produce individual, organisational and customer service metrics. Of course, there are going to be other factors at play. But if you have the kind of engagement arrangement in the first instance where you can set out exactly what the organization wants to achieve.
most of my coaching is on a triangulated basis where the organization works with the coach, works with the individual, it's confidential coaching, but at the heart of it, there are some individual and organizational metrics. that they would like to improve. So setting that out right up front in the engagement area is absolutely crucial. Three areas were developed, which I think was slightly surprising to me, but not I wasn't amazed if I can blend those two reactions together.
What came across from the leaders? I was interviewing board members and heads of and C-suite officers. And when I said, what does it actually mean to you in terms of evaluation, coaching, mentoring? What are you wanting to see as an output? Three other things came up which will be on a spectrum quite differently. So what came up was we'd like to see distributed leadership.
So we'd like to see that the coaching and mentoring that you are delivering at some point impacts everybody in the organization. And that could be through something as relatively simple as the coachees and the mentees become ambassadors for coaching and mentoring and become the next level of internal coaches and mentors. And they demonstrate perhaps characteristics that the organization wants to see exhibited in an organization.
So whether that's respect or kindness or other characteristics, so that there's that waterfall analysis of coaching and mentoring, not just being seen for the elite leadership. And that was again, something that came across very loud and clear. We want coaching and mentoring in one sense or another to impact everybody in the organization at some point. So that was distributed leadership that came across. The one other element that came across again, loud and clear.
We want the organization to exhibit a coaching foundation factor. So what do I mean by that? They describe this as we don't want just an elite group of people to be coaches and mentees of the future or coaches and mentors internally.
We want the pervasive sense of a leadership structure that absorbs the fact that we're not perfect, going back to that perception of perfection, that we accept that there's more work to do and that involves a cultural piece that may well take a while to exhibit but a coaching foundation factor is our organization set up to receive coaching and mentoring and then perhaps the slightly more surprising one was going right out to perhaps a more intangible
elements of the six probably the most challenging to evaluate. How does our coaching and mentoring impact societal deficits? Now, my audience for this work was in a not-for-profit organization. So it's perhaps unsurprising that they said, well, we're here to do good works. We are here to evaluate how we're impacting and demonstrating social purpose. We are here because there's a problem in society. But that came across again, loud and clear.
We want coaching and mentoring to be aimed at delivering what we're supposed to be doing. So reinforcing perhaps the charitable objectives or the purpose of the organization. So six critical evaluation themes.
What I then did in terms of evaluating it was to say, when I'm... organise, when I'm working with an organisation for the first time, and you may well have been in this situation as well Claire, people come up to me and say talk to me about coaching and mentoring Jeremy, sounds great, let's crack on. And actually the first thing I say is well what do want to achieve? And that can sometimes prompt a conversation which is quite new because it's coaching, mentoring, you've heard about that.
As you know, it's a relatively young profession still. And it's important to say, if we don't set out the evaluation metrics right at the start, first of all, how are we going to know whether we're being successful? So let's work on individual, organization, and customer service metrics. Where are you now? Where would you like to get to? What are the things that we can do through coaching and mentoring? to influence those metrics.
So whether that's net promoter scores, whether that's individual performance in skills and disciplines, whether it's gaining extra skills, whether it's the organization delivering against their objectives, against their mission, against their vision, and on customer service, ultimately we all have a customer. What is the customer seeing from the results of our coaching and mentoring? And then on the other side of that spectrum, How can we evidence that we have a coaching foundation factor?
For example, can we evidence a distributed leadership? Can we do internal surveys, external surveys of our colleagues in an organization where we can physically see the fact that people recognize an impact of coaching and mentoring? So for me, one of the biggest takeaways of my work over 12 months was spend an awful lot of time on that.
upfront engagements because if we get three or six months down the line and people are investing perhaps significant amounts of money in coaching and mentoring there will be people like me in my former life saying and what's the return and I think you can do that in the same way as you would produce an investment appraisal for a machine for example what are we going to get for that what's the payback in the same way you would perhaps want to say I'd like to see a higher retention rate.
I'd like to see the fact that we are able to recruit better. We are able to attract better. I'd like to see a movement in the net promoter score. I'd like to see the fact that if people do an analysis of their skills base and maybe they're seven out of 10, a year later, we can move them to eight, 8.59, but have really clear definitive measures agreed upfront that people can measure you along. I have a little model. I call it my ball model. It's an acronym.
I'm not great on acronyms, but I do have an acronym. So an evaluation ball model where identifying first the desired outcomes from coaching and mentoring is absolutely critical. So bespoke to client evaluation techniques. So Every client will be different. Let's make it bespoke. Attention to the purpose of coaching and mentoring might A, link strategic objectives to the desired outcomes. So what's that linkage all of the time? That was actually one of the phrases that came up all of the time.
I want to see that link and then listen to how the client determines success. The coach might have some ideas. What matters is what the client thinks. What does the client want to achieve? So spending a great deal of time defining what you wish to achieve out of coaching and mentoring. And to a certain extent, this is perhaps when coaching and mentoring does get put into that fluffy bracket, which is, sounds great, people are enjoying it, but where can I see the results from that?
And I completely accept that in any kind of organization where cash is a scarce resource, and things are competing for cash, there should be that evaluation up front. So my view out of my work from my master's degree absolutely evidenced that there was no consensus. There is still no consensus. But what I think I managed to do through my research was tighten it down to those six particular areas, which I think do apply to other organizations as well. And it's a reminder of what are we here for?
Because of course you get a coach whose preference is to explore X, Y, Z, but actually the question is what are we here for? And of course the work is never the work, but the outcomes are always the outcomes. It's really interesting because one of the things that I've been working on thinking about for quite a long time is the difference in a single session. between what is the outcome you would like and how will you know you've got it.
And you can't measure the outcome, you can only measure the no. And that's what you're describing. I mean, responding to what you've said, there's a lot there, isn't there, about attitude? There's a lot about psychological safety. There's about stuff about encouraging people to think, which are creating that coaching culture.
And I absolutely love that you've got the shape that your work... that the work that you've done over time is about, you said, a return on investment of an investment in a machine. What I love about the way you describe that, Jeremy, is that you know what that looks like. And therefore that gives you an edge or a view on what an evaluation of coaching might look like.
Because what I noticed having been in the profession forever is is that as much as there might be a desire, unless you know what the actual thing needs to look like, it's really quite difficult to match the desire with a thing. a completely, absolutely on point analysis, Claire, in that that's what I saw.
And coming from my background, trying to anticipate as I tended to do as a CFO, I was all, I wasn't risk averse by any means, but I was paid to think about the problems and the problems for people. subscribing to coaching and mentoring are the fact that there are people like me in my former profession who say, do you know what we do?
And these are the kinds of comments that you get quite rationally, which is, I'm sorry, Jeremy, we've just paid a hundred thousand pounds to hire this person into a C-suite role. Why on earth do we want to offer them coaching and mentoring? Surely there, we, You get so many people who sit back as a hirer and say, well, I've just gone through a six month process. I've got the best person for the job. Why do I need to invest any further time in coaching and mentoring?
So they sit back, they give themselves a pat on the back for making a great hire. And you and I both know that the retention rate for people in C-suite roles is is less than 50 % those people still being imposed within 18 months. So there's a very high failure rate.
because if we begin to think about that, it's not surprising because we put people into usually, let's say, a more demanding role, probably in a different sector, working with different people on an executive basis, and probably working with a completely different set. if not for the first time, of external stakeholders as well. Maybe working with people like banks or investors for the first time, maybe dealing with perhaps slightly more public profile roles.
And we launched that on people and say, off you go. And almost all other professions in our small world engage coaches and mentors. quite like the analogies between sport and business as well. And it's the idea that, well, we buy a player in football, for example, and we just say, off you go. Kick the ball around on a Saturday afternoon and hopefully it will go OK. And of course, if you apply that to where we are in industry, it's very, very different. So I do think there's legacy perception.
And you hit the nail on the head, Claire. It's about outcomes. What do we want to see out of an outcome? And that's what my work was aimed at trying to investigate. and when you're in a new role, that's enough. You've described an awful lot of things that you have to do before you can get to an outcome. And then you're out because you didn't get your outcome.
And we've all heard, I'm not a great fan of this and I never was as an executive either, this, what are you gonna do in your first 90 to 100 days? Quite often, I said, I'm going to understand for the first 90 to 100 days because I think I can make some quite ill judged, unfounded decisions in the first 100 days. simply to make an impact. And I think some of those decisions could well be wrong.
I know it's different if it's a turnaround situation, but I think there's an awful lot of value in understanding the people, the organizers. As you've mentioned, the system. How does the system work? How do the teams work? Because trying to implement an outcome without understanding all of those issues is a real challenge. And of course, not all of the time it works. And I've got plenty of scars on my back from the challenges that you face in industry.
And that's an element of my own mentoring as well. I do think it helps that for somebody working with the kind of coaches and mentees that I work with, having been in their shoes does help to a certain extent as well. Yeah, yeah, and you've got, Timothy Clark would describe that as first move of vulnerability. I've done roles like this and I've got scars like you have. it's okay for me to have scars. Suddenly I can be myself.
It's that perception of failure as well in that, and when I'm delivering some executive education, I show a few videos from various people, Simon Sinek, Sir Clive Woodward. I do a really great one about leadership by Colin Powell, former Secretary of State of the US.
But there is that perception, which is a difficult one for everybody to overcome in organizations, failure or not being successful, let's call it that instead, is, and I take no credit for this phrase either, that that kind of unsuccessful element of your work is an absolute tattoo and it stays with you forever when in actual fact, if you have a 30 to 35 year career in industry, it's going to go wrong at some point.
And when I'm coaching CFOs or aspirational CFOs in particular, One of the things I say to them is, look, I have a six-year-old grandson. If your organization is above budget, above plan, your customers are coming to you, you've got plenty of cash in the bank, everybody thinks your organization's great, do you know what? My six-year-old grandson can turn up to a board meeting as a CFO and read from a script that says everything's great.
What really matters And it's going to happen by the law of averages 50 % of the time is when it's bad news or unwelcome news. That's when you have to understand and maybe have the benefit of coaching and mentoring that that's when you earn your stripes and you can take the value of coaching series of issues, one issue. You can take the value of mentoring, growing the individual as a person to make those kinds of decisions.
better and you can take that into a situation where it may not necessarily be a crisis but there are challenges because they happen every week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And coaching is about building the capacity of the adult, isn't it? Not building the capacity of your grandson to read the script.
self-awareness where, you know Claire more than I do, it's about, that could be quite a challenge in terms of vulnerability as well in looking at the mirror and saying, I'm not very good at that, or I want to improve on that. So that self-awareness part right at the start. considering your options, how am I, if do I want to, first of all, do I want to change? If I don't want to change, coaching isn't going to work.
If I want to change, which parts of me or my series of issues do I want to change? How then am I going to achieve my full potential for the benefit of myself and my organization? What are the actions I'm going to take? And then how can I learn on the job as it were to achieve? and maximise my performance. as you say, starts with the individual, starts with the organisation, the acceptance of self-awareness and vulnerability. Yeah, yeah, and not everyone can change. Absolutely, I agree.
And then there's something about what are the coping strategies that I need to put in place so I can serve the organisation and the individual. So how do people find out more about this, Jeremy? People can find me, I'm relatively easy to find on LinkedIn. Jeremy Earnshaw is my profile name on LinkedIn. There's not too many of us, I don't think on LinkedIn. I have my own website, www.clarendoncoaching, all one word, and that's clarendoncoaching.com.
That gives you a flavor of my coaching and mentoring techniques. It gives you my models. It gives you the kind of work that I do with my testimonials on there as well. I do actually have my own podcast, is Clarendon Chronicles, which is on my YouTube channel as well. that's youtube.com forward slash at Jeremy Earnshaw. And I tend to invite guests onto my own podcast for general leadership and team building and some professional coaches in there as well. So hopefully quite easy to find.
Great. Well, I'll put all that in the show notes. Listeners, Jeremy, thank you so much for coming to The Coaching Inn and talking about counting. Thank you very much, Claire. It's a real pleasure to speak with you. Thank you again for the invitation. And thank you everyone for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode.
Check out the show notes for our open day in March, 2025 and some other goodies that we're going to be offering to you as our community of guests at the Coaching Inn. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you everyone for listening. Bye bye.