How do you reward high performing staff when bonuses are not an option? Music charity Youth Music and coaching and organisational development group Cocomotion, found a way, says Griff Griffiths, Alison Whybrow and Teresa Meek
When HR consultant, Teresa Meek, was HR manager at children’s music charity Youth Music, she found herself at an impasse. She had a group of high performing staff, but lacked options to reward them for their efforts. It had crossed her mind that personal development coaching might be something the staff would value, but her initial searches for a supplier had been discouraging: costs were high and it wasn’t clear how she could ensure the quality of the coaching she would be buying.
Anne Alaoui and Griff Griffiths had just co-founded non-profit Cocomotion specifically to bring high quality and affordable coaching to the third sector. A core belief of theirs was that coaching should be available to staff at all levels, not just senior managers. This was a perfect fit with Meek’s requirement for coaching focused on staff of mixed grades and experience.
First steps
The programme was something of an experiment. Youth Music had no history of using coaching, and Meek was keen to explore how it might take the first steps towards a coaching culture.
She decided to explore this by setting a very open frame for the coaching: staff would be free to use the coaching as they saw fit, with the proviso that the coaching was connected with work.
Cocomotion is committed to measuring the work it does and sharing the results as a way of contributing to the third sector and coaching communities. But Meek’s group of eight was exactly that – a group, not a team – and although, with 60 staff, Youth Music was small enough for the group to know each other, members were not all working with one another from day to day.
With such an open brief, and no overarching business objective, how would Cocomotion measure outcomes, beyond getting the usual feedback? Would it see any change at group or organisational level, or would the eight coaching relationships remain individual?
Creating a programme
So much goes into creating and running a coaching programme – sourcing coaches, briefing participants, matching, coaching, group supervision, gathering feedback during and after the programme, reporting and managing issues – that it would be easy to find excuses to avoid looking for changes that might turn out not to be there.
When Cocomotion suggested four wellbeing measures to Alison Whybrow, its coaching adviser, she was honest: “You might see individual changes, but they could go in different directions and tell you nothing about the group.”
Cocomotion went ahead anyway, and participants completed four scales before and after the programme: the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS), suitable for non-clinicians; the Cognitive Hardiness Scale, which provides a measure of resilience to change; and the Personal Wellbeing Index and the Adult Hope Scale.
Cocomotion then organised a matching event. Five coaches and a coach supervisor worked with it to deliver the programme. The coaches themselves were left to organise the when and how of the coaching.
When the clients were briefed, there was some resistance to coaching over the telephone, not face to face. This changed as the programme progressed, and by mid-way, reports were coming in of how efficient and effective telephone coaching was.
Meek memorably described the coaching as “right here, right now learning”. She observed increased confidence in the participants, as they used the coaching to help them find and test their own solutions to day-to-day problems.
Marked improvements
She noticed, too, that participants became more interested in learning and getting feedback, and that they developed a greater awareness of their own development needs.
Participants’ feedback mirrored Meek’s observations on confidence: “I’m more confident in what I’m doing, even if I’m saying I can’t do this… or demanding something from people,” and also suggested increased personal effectiveness: “As a result of the coaching, we’re now organising the tasks that can be done without decisions from directors and managers.”
A key reported change was the capacity to reflect: “The charity needs to think about operating differently, not just leaping from one idea to the next – it’s about becoming more reflective.”
These are only aggregate results, but interestingly, the measures showed a marked improvement across the group. Reported levels of depression, anxiety and stress dropped significantly; and scores on cognitive hardiness, personal wellbeing and hope, increased.
In fact, they improved, despite staff facing an exceptional amount of organisational change.
What are the reasons for these improvements – assuming it was coaching that made the difference?
Coaching fosters self-efficacy and resilience, so the increase in resilience (Cognitive Hardiness scale) might easily be attributed to the coaching intervention. The Hope Scale measures an individual’s sense of self-determination and ability to influence, and their sense of available solutions: both measures increased slightly, which could be expected as a coaching outcome.
Personal wellbeing? Perhaps the reflective nature of coaching leads to a greater appreciation of what people have in their lives.
What about depression, anxiety and stress? The scores were in the ‘normal’ band, both before and after, although slightly lower when measured the second time. Perhaps for the above reasons. But when the metrics are viewed in light of participants’ stories, it is possible to see the impact of coaching.
Contact details: http://www.cocomotion.org/
Coaching at Work, Volume 7, issue 5