By taking the time to measure executive coaching outcomes, organizations can add legitimacy to their coaching investments, gain support for additional efforts, and prove that even “soft” investments like coaching can have easily quantifiable returns.
By Ingrid Johnson

Executive coaching can be a very worthy investment for organizations, but many companies are wary of the coaching profession due to a historical lack of measurable outcomes. Often, both coaches and companies relied on how clients “felt” about the experience, allowing wholly subjective responses to be the final evaluation of the investment. However, in the current business climate, there’s a strong push for hard numbers and objective measurement.

It’s not an impossible ideal to pursue. Companies can – and indeed, should – measure the outcomes of executive coaching investments in more objective and bottom-line oriented ways. Here, some of the top methods for measuring outcomes will be...