One-on-one coaching is a popular method of developing vital skills in employees, best offered by ICF-accredited coaches. While this personalized form of coaching has historically only been made available to upper management, new advancements in learning technology have created platforms that make one-on-one coaching feasible for all employees.

What Is One-on-One Coaching?

One-on-one coaching is a structured process where one person, the coach, helps another, the coachee, to overcome a specific challenge or learn a specific skill. Through coaching sessions, the coach helps the coachee by sharing knowledge, identifying any barriers to overcoming a challenge, and showing the coachee different ways to approach situations or challenges. The personalized nature of one-on-one coaching enables the coach to tailor the sessions for the coachee and approach things in the way the coachee will best understand and learn. 

In the minds of many, the traditional coaching model is based on a group setting. In sports, for example, a coach attends to an entire team because they must function together. Many companies also use coaches who provide workshops, seminars, and other events for L&D objectives where numerous employees are engaged at once. These settings make sense when a group of people all have the same learning goals and/or needs.  

However, in a business environment, there are certain skills vital to organizational performance that is best taught one-on-one. One-on-one coaching can cover nearly any topic that helps people reach their professional and/or personal goals, by creating a roadmap that the coachee can follow on their path to success. 

In short, coaching is sometimes used for groups, but when time factors and high levels of skill are involved, a one-to-one engagement is often the best choice. 

Coaches as “Experts”

You can describe learning and development programs in many ways; for example, by topic, setting, employee type, or method of instruction, which is where the subject of coaches comes in. In the Growthspace lexicon, learning and development programs are led by experts, who fall into three groups: trainers, mentors, and coaches.

• Trainers – optimal for short-term instruction, often for hard skills
• Mentors – experienced employees who take others under their wing to help develop them through discussions and on-the-job training
• Coaches – external experts hired to implement learning and development programs for a contracted period

Coaches are different from trainers and mentors because they specialize in working with high-level employees who expect top performance. One-on-one development plans are relatively expensive to implement, while the coachee in this situation is often a busy executive who needs to make the most of the time they spend on L&D. You can expect many coaches to have experience working under pressure according to a high level of expectations, which is not always the case with mentors or trainers. 

In addition, coaches are familiar with the complex techniques of nurturing skills. It is often not easy to get somebody to alter their management style or the way they communicate. These behaviors are deeply connected to personality and comfort. A top-notch coach will understand the most up-to-date methods for changing these ingrained habits, along with the ability to act quickly while maintaining a good relationship with the client. 

For Which Employee Types Is One-on-One Coaching Used?

Historically, coaching programs were allocated to executives. This is particularly true when it comes to developing soft skills. The personalized attention that coaching involves makes it easier to provide a focused upskilling program when an employee needs to rapidly develop in a specific area. Common areas where executives turn to coaching include interpersonal skills, time management, and communication skills. In fact, the increasing importance of soft skills development is a top reason for the growth in the global coaching market.    

Perhaps the strongest example of this is leadership skills, which are especially multifaceted and complex. Each leader naturally has strengths and weaknesses, so the most effective leadership training programs are individualized. 

As recognition of the benefits of employee development grows, different styles of coaching are being increasingly offered to all levels. This is partly due to a modern corporate mindset that believes in the potential of every employee, in that professional growth is a matter of opportunity instead of being limited to certain workers (i.e. the Growth Mindset). Nowadays, “leaders” can include employees at all levels, from the CEO to production line workers who take initiative.   

So, in addition to the traditional form of one-on-one training provided by an outside expert, coaching engagements can also use:

• Group coaching that takes advantage of a common challenge within a certain collection of employees
• Internal coaches who apply coaching techniques for supporting the professional goals of specific employees
• Life coaches who help leaders with both their professional and personal lives

Besides making the most of your organization’s skill inventory, these variations mean a lower cost for a coaching engagement. In the case of group training, this allows you to spread the cost of an L&D program across more workers. Similarly, with an internal coach, you can save money by using a salaried employee to deliver the service instead of a premium-priced outside expert. 

The Benefits of One-on-One Coaching Programs

One-on-one coaching is an asset both for the organization and for the individual. It can have transformational effects on coachees, helping them overcome their challenges and be better team members. With an investment in employee development through coaching, employees are more likely to feel valued, be more productive and motivated, and increase their overall performance. For example, according to the American University in Washington, coaching benefits goal achievement, contributions to the organization, work satisfaction, and productive relationships.

HR professionals are always watching those return on investment (ROI) statistics. During efforts to get a green light from upper management to start a coaching program, such figures can help. But finding a consistent “average ROI” for coaching is difficult. Many are familiar with the Metrix Global study, which found that an executive coaching program delivered a 788% ROI, but other figures are available. Another strong selling point of a one-on-one coaching program is that one third of Fortune 500 companies use such services.   

Soft Skill Coaching Alternatives

Even for organizations with all the funding that it needs to implement one-on-one external coaching programs, it is still a good idea to look at all your options. As we mentioned above, there is a wide variety of L&D instruction forms that can upskill your workers. So, when thinking about how much you should rely on external coaches, consider the following:

Scalability – One-on-one coaching by definition does not apply to more than a single employee at a time, so you’ll need to hire and run many programs if you have a lot of workers in need of such an intense level of support.

Experience – Other kinds of L&D programs benefit from features like discussion, teamwork, and community building, while a coach only provides their single point of view.

Chemistry – Not every coaching relationship works out because sometimes the coach and the employee don’t get along well; this is especially important when an in-depth, long-term engagement demands close work together.

Choosing the Best Coach for Professional Growth

In light of the above, let’s say that you still choose to go for a one-on-one coach. You will want the optimal match for your employees, particularly when considering the investment that you are about to make, and that your company might depend on these skills for success. You need to pick one that is right for the employee in question. But what does that mean? Here are some of the factors that you should think about when trying to find the best sort of coach for individual workers in your organization.

Organizational Expertise

What sort of organization forms most of the candidate’s coaching experience? Do they focus on startups, multinationals, or SMEs? This will give you an idea about what kinds of skill issues they are accustomed to. For instance, a startup coach will often deal with skills related to creativity, whereas a Fortune 500 coach will be more involved with decision making and strategic thinking. 

Areas of Skill

In addition to organization type, many coaches specialize in areas of skill, such as leadership, problem-solving, and communication. Identifying their upskilling experience is usually just a matter of reading their website or LinkedIn profile. However, understanding what skills an individual employee needs is a bigger challenge. An employee who thinks that their leadership abilities need to improve might just be poor at communicating their ideas. Of course, a good coach will be able to figure out what areas of weakness their client has. But, when HR knows in advance what skills a worker should focus on, they can find exactly the right type of coach. One way of getting this done is to use a talent development platform, which helps to look at skill elements as a way of refining L&D needs on an individual basis.  

Credentials

The common starting point is again to look at the candidate’s LinkedIn profile or website. But your investigation can go a lot further, for example by:

• Reading some of their social media posts to get an idea of their coaching style and philosophy
• Looking at whatever recommendations they have, and then determining what sorts of clients have written them. For instance, has a CEO from a top company written the recommendation, or is it just a quote without a real source?
• Checking to see if they have accreditation through a well-known coaching organization such as the ICF, the Association for Coaching, and the Institute of Coaching
• Reviewing their education to see what kind of university/college they attended, if they have real-world work experience, and if they ever take advanced courses to stay current with the latest coaching techniques 

Measuring the Success of a One-on-One Coaching Program

The true measure of the quality of a coaching program is how it benefits the employee’s behavior. Metrics like ROI are useful. But it’s also important to look at how the employee feels about their experience, and if other stakeholders notice a difference. According to the ICF, there are three factors to examine when evaluating the effectiveness of coaching:

Fundamental Changes

Productivity in most professional roles is multidimensional. Employees do more than work strictly on tasks. In addition, after coaching, they should:

1. Be able to work in a more strategic manner and overcome the impediments that prevented them from operating at their desired professional level.
   
2. Build strong relationships among peers and with those at other levels of the company. This could be in the form of improved teamwork skills or closer interpersonal connections.
   
3. Be efficient at handling current workloads. At times, the original reason for hiring a coach is because the employee found themselves falling behind in certain tasks due to lack of skills.
   
4. Expand their abilities. Another reason to hire a coach is to go beyond your current limits. This is common among top level executives who need to bump up their performance to take on a new role or expand the organization. 

Note that these four points tend to happen in order, so that to expand your abilities, you must first overcome your skill challenges, etc. 

Strategic Value

Not every coaching engagement covers all four points, and that makes a difference for assessing outcomes. For instance, if you look at all the additional revenue generated by an employee after they receive coaching:

• 30% of the revenue will often result from employees who master points 1 and 2
• 70% of the revenue will often result from employees who master points 3 and 4

In other words, there are clear advantages for coaching programs that address a coachee’s challenges in a holistic manner by moving through all four types of change. 

Insight

Just as there are four types of fundamental changes, there are four levels of new insights that an employee can develop:

1. The ability for introspection, i.e. understanding more about your personality and capabilities
2. Being more empathetic and seeing how emotions play into professional situations
3. Working through intuition as you get a feel for how to be more efficient
4. Acting to inspire others once you see how the organization can expand based on your new set of skills and performance level 

HR, Technology, Sourcing, and Evaluation

As you can see, setting up a one-on-one coaching program is no easy task. In some ways, there is more pressure than usual on HR teams to get it right because of the importance and resource demands needed to upskill the best employees in the company. For this reason, HR professionals turn to L&D platforms that support them in running the initiative.

Skill Definition

Employees typically have a sense of their areas of weakness. This might be through their own assessment, and it can also be based on stakeholder feedback. But, even when this is true, more details are needed. If an employee needs leadership training, what does that mean? Leadership covers many abilities such as self-awareness, communication, flexibility, and strategic thinking. Yet even within these categories, there is variation. For instance, “communication” might describe spoken, written, or interpersonal skills. A solid L&D platform will be based on a taxonomy that helps you to understand precisely what skills need to be the focus of a coaching engagement. 

Sourcing

We’ve discussed how to choose the best coach for an employee’s needs. It’s another long process that technology can help with. Talent development platforms give you access to a global listing of coaches that categorize them according to certifications, specialty, availability, languages, and other vital factors. Plus, the platform should have a feature that allows you to see how well the coach has been graded by previous clients so that their level of quality is clear. When you need to find a team of coaches for a large organization, it’s essential to be able to source them quickly. 

Evaluation

Measuring engagement success rates over time, and for dozens of employees and clients, takes extensive resources when done manually. You’ll also need a consistent method if numerous HR staffers are part of the evaluation effort. L&D platforms are critical here as they provide a single, intuitive process for grading the success of a coaching initiative. These metrics can be shared across the company in order to make decisions about the value of a particular coach or program, and to insert an employee’s development plan records to reflect their skill level. 

Growthspace Optimizes One-on-One Coaching Programs

Coaching can be an expensive effort, so companies want the best coaches available in order to maximize ROI. Growthspace’s specialty is connecting employees who need highly specific skills to the leading coaches in the field. Through our L&D platform, organizations can easily find top coaches for their top employees, and implement scalable L&D programs in minimal time.