Why Most Sponsored Coaching Fails Before It Starts
The Business & Leadership Coaching Company
Series: General I Theme: Coaching Readiness
Read Time: 10 Minutes
There is a quiet pattern in corporate-sponsored executive coaching and leadership development that almost everybody who has worked in the field for long enough has noticed, and almost nobody has named cleanly. The participant comes out of the engagement reporting a positive experience. The coach or facilitator has done good work, professionally and ethically, by every standard the profession holds itself to. The coachee feels they have grown, in ways they can articulate when asked. And the organisation, if it looks honestly at the leadership behaviour the development intervention was meant to develop, sees almost no measurable change.
This is one of the most expensive disappointments in leadership development, and it is one of the least diagnosed. Sponsored coaching at senior levels typically costs the organisation the equivalent of a junior salary per participant, runs for 6 to 12 months, and is presented to the participant as a meaningful investment in their personal and professional development. When it works, it is one of the highest-leverage development interventions available. When it does not work, the gap between the cost and the return is one of the least scrutinised line items in the leadership development budget.
The reason most sponsored coaching does not work is not that the coaches are inadequate. Most of them are excellent. The reason is that 80 percent of the value of any sponsored coaching engagement is determined before the first session, and most organisations invest almost nothing in the work that determines that 80 percent.
This is the central finding of recent research by Humphrey and Norman, who have spent the last several years studying what separates sponsored coaching engagements that produce lasting organisational change from sponsored engagements that produce a satisfied participant and no measurable difference. Their work names something that practitioners have known intuitively for a long time: the readiness gap. The full paper is available on request, but the principles are worth understanding even if you never read the original research, as it mirrors our experience as well.
The readiness gap shows up in three predictable places, and corporate sponsors who learn to address it transform the return on their coaching investment.
The first place it shows up is in the alignment between the participant, the sponsor, and the organisation about what the coaching is actually for. Most sponsored engagements begin with a participant who has been told they are being given coaching, often as a reward, sometimes as a remediation, occasionally as a development investment in a high-potential current or future leader. The participant has their own private hopes for the engagement. The sponsor, usually the participant's line manager or two-up manager, has their own expectations, often unspoken. The organisation, through HR or the L&D function, has a third set of objectives, sometimes statutory, sometimes contractual, sometimes implicit. These three sets of expectations are rarely surfaced and almost never reconciled before the first session. The coach then begins the engagement working with whichever set of expectations is most accessible to them, which is usually the participant's, and the engagement quietly drifts away from the organisational outcome the sponsor was hoping for. At the end of 12 months, everybody is satisfied with their own version of the work, and the gap between the version is precisely the gap between the cost and the return to the organisation.
The second place the readiness gap shows up is in the chemistry meeting itself. In most organisations, the chemistry meeting is the brief introductory session in which the participant meets two or three potential coaches and selects the one they want to work with. The standard convention is that the meeting is about chemistry: whether the participant feels comfortable with the coach, whether there is a good interpersonal fit, whether the coaching relationship feels like one that will be productive. This convention systematically loads the chemistry meeting with the wrong work. The chemistry meeting is the only structured opportunity in the entire engagement to clarify what the coaching is for, what the participant brings to it, what the sponsor expects from it, and what success would look like in concrete behavioural terms. It is the most important conversation in the entire engagement, and it is routinely treated as a get-to-know-you call. Coaches who try to use the chemistry meeting for its actual purpose are often penalised by participants who report back that the coach was "too intense" or "too business-like". Coaches who play the chemistry meeting as the pleasant introduction it is conventionally treated as are rewarded with the engagement, and the engagement begins on quicksand.
The third place the readiness gap shows up is in the absence of a credible commitment from the participant to the work the coaching will require of them. Coaching is not a passive intervention. It works only if the participant is willing to bring their own development to the table, to do the work between sessions, to bring observable behavioural change back into their organisational context, and to expose themselves to the discomfort of being seen working on something difficult. Most participants, asked at the start of the engagement whether they are committed to that, will say yes. Most participants, observed across the engagement, do not in fact bring that level of commitment. This is not a failure of character; it is a failure of expectation-setting. The participant has not been told, clearly, what the coaching will actually require of them, and so the participant brings the level of effort that feels appropriate for what they imagined the coaching would be, which is almost always less than what would be required for the engagement to produce real change.
These three readiness failures are not separate problems. They are aspects of the same underlying issue, which is that most organisations do not invest in the work that has to happen before the coaching begins, and they expect the coach to produce the value of the engagement entirely from the engagement itself. This is structurally impossible. No coach, however skilled, can compensate for an unreconciled expectation set, a chemistry meeting that did the wrong work, and a participant who is not actually ready to develop. When the engagement underperforms, the conventional response is to question the coach. The honest diagnosis is that the engagement was set up to underperform before the coach was selected.
What does the readiness work actually look like?
In the most effective sponsored engagements, the work begins with a structured conversation between the sponsor and the participant, ideally facilitated by a third party with experience of organisational coaching, in which the three sets of expectations are surfaced, examined, and reconciled. This conversation produces a written brief that names the behavioural changes the engagement is meant to produce, the organisational context they will be produced in, and the specific markers that will indicate progress. This brief is not a performance contract. It is a working document that the coach, the participant, and the sponsor all use as the reference point for the engagement.
The chemistry meeting, in these effective engagements, is treated as a working session rather than a meet-and-greet. The participant brings the brief. The coaches meet the participant having read the brief. The conversation is about how each coach would approach the work, what they would push the participant on, how they would handle the inevitable moments where the work becomes uncomfortable. The chemistry being assessed is not the warmth of the relationship but the working chemistry: whether this coach and this participant can credibly do this specific work together. Participants choose coaches based on substance rather than rapport, and the engagement begins on a foundation that can carry weight.
The participant, in these engagements, has been clearly told what the work will require of them, and has had the opportunity to either commit to that work or decline the engagement. Declining the engagement is not a failure; it is a meaningful filter. Participants who are not ready to do the work are better served by deferring the engagement until they are, rather than entering an engagement they will not honour and producing, six months in, the slow disappointment of an investment that was not going to produce its return. Organisations that build the option to decline into their coaching design see their hit rate on engagements rise materially, because the engagements that proceed are the ones whose participants are genuinely committed.
The sponsor, in these engagements, is briefed on their own role, which is often new to them. Most line managers asked to sponsor a coaching engagement assume their job is to authorise the budget and stay out of the way. In the engagements that produce real change, the sponsor's job is significantly more active: regular check-in conversations with the participant about the behavioural targets, willingness to give honest feedback on what is and is not changing, and ongoing alignment with the coach about the organisational context the work is happening in. This does not require the sponsor to be involved in the content of the coaching; the confidentiality of the coaching relationship is preserved. It requires the sponsor to be involved in the conditions that make the coaching produce results.
When organisations invest in this readiness work, the return on their coaching budget changes character. The engagements that proceed produce observable behavioural change. The participants become noticeably more capable in the specific dimensions the coaching was meant to develop. The wider leadership team starts to notice. Other senior leaders begin asking whether they can be considered for similar coaching investments. And the cumulative effect, over two or three years, is the kind of leadership development culture that organisations spend years trying to engineer through other interventions, and that sponsored coaching, designed correctly, produces almost as a by-product.
When organisations skip the readiness work, the return on their coaching budget is what most readers of this article have probably observed in their own organisations: a series of engagements that the participants enjoyed, the coaches were paid for, and the organisation saw little of in the leadership behaviour that the coaching was meant to develop. The budget continues to be allocated, partly because the participants speak well of the experience, partly because nobody is incentivised to ask the harder question, and partly because the alternative interventions the budget might fund are no more rigorous in their readiness design than the coaching is.
The choice for the senior leader reading this is not whether to engage with executive coaching. Most senior leaders will engage with coaching at some point, either through corporate sponsorship or privately, and the right answer in most careers is that some structured external development is absolutely worth doing. The choice is whether to engage with coaching in the conventional way and accept the returns the conventional way produces, or to engage with coaching with the kind of readiness work that materially changes the value of the engagement. This is true whether you are a participant being offered sponsored coaching, an HR director designing a coaching programme for a leadership cohort, or an executive considering coaching at your own expense. The work that determines whether coaching produces real change is not the coaching itself. It is the work that happens before the coaching begins.
If you are a senior leader who has been offered coaching, or who is considering it, the question to bring to the engagement is not whether the coach is good. The question is whether the readiness work has been done. If it has not, the engagement is unlikely to produce what you hope it will, however good the coach is. If you are an HR or L&D director designing coaching for a leadership cohort, the question to bring to your design is not which coaching firm to engage. It is what your organisation is willing to invest in the readiness work that determines 80 percent of the value of the engagement.
If you would like to think through whether coaching is the right next step for you, or how to design a coaching engagement that produces real change for your organisation, a Discovery Call is a confidential conversation about where you are, what is in the way, what you would want to do about it, and how coaching can support you in moving from uncertainty to clarity to strategic action.
Book via the link below.
Download the Executive Strategic Audit to define your Vision, calibrate your energy, and lead with sustainable high performance. Because your team does not need you to endure. They need you to lead.
Ready to explore this further? Book your free Discovery Call
The Business & Leadership Coaching Company
Business • Leadership • Career • Life
Comments