Investing in a coaching program for young employees is a critical aspect to develop employees with emotional intelligence (EQ) employees that are fully engaged and dedicated to the organization. However, all to often, these programs can fall short of achieving their desired outcomes, because they simply weren’t structured properly to succeed.

Some common pitfalls include:

• Setting the wrong tone for the engagement.
• Low senior leadership buy-in.
• Disengaged participants.
• Lack of manager support.
• Manager using the coach to “fix” a problem and not engaging with it.
• Experience disjointed from other learning and development (L&D) efforts.
• Impact of the program not measured.

Coaching programs are only as strong as the strategy and foundation they are built upon. A small investment of time and intention up front will yield significant returns in program impact.

Considering Organizational Maturity

While there are some clear “right” and “wrong” approaches to coaching, most organizations aren’t making glaring mistakes. Instead, they often choose methods that work well for others but aren’t suited to their organization’s maturity, culture or goals. For example, many L&D professionals start by delivering organization-wide training, especially with junior employees. It’s natural to be tempted to reach as many people as possible and focus on scale, recognizing that there’s just no way to provide one-on-one support to every single employee. As a result of this mindset, we regularly get requests for workshops or webinars for young team members.

This may be the perfect approach if you are looking to align your people on a common language, teach frameworks and lay a foundation for the future. However, if you are looking to drive increased performance among these employees in the next six months and this is your approach, you may be disappointed with the results. If training’s goal to increase employee retention, you likely won’t move the needle. With this in mind, one-on-one or group coaching with a smaller subset of employees (potentially rolled out a cohort at a time) can likely be more effective while still budget conscious.

Alternatively, jumping into an in-depth coaching program when L&D is brand new to an organization might be premature. There may be some foundational work to be done to establish competencies and career paths prior to launching coaching initiatives.

Outsourcing What Your Business Truly Needs

With trainings that are core to the company’s mission, you may want to consider keeping it in-house. The message may feel different and impersonable delivered by an outside representative, who doesn’t know the company’s culture as well as its own people. Conversely, you should consider outsourcing things that require deep expertise your team doesn’t possess or a breadth of experience that’s difficult to achieve among any individual L&D organization. For example, any one coach isn’t the right fit for everyone. In addition to saving on cost, outsourcing coaching allows you to tap into the breadth of expertise and diversity that is needed to serve a diverse group of employees.

Clearly Define Success Metrics

It’s no surprise to anyone that one of the biggest challenges we face in L&D is proving return on investment (ROI). It’s important that all stakeholders are aligned at the onset of an initiative about its desired impact. This can help determine how to structure the engagement.

It’s important to note that with coaching in particular, metrics need to be defined at two levels: the organizational and the individual. What does success look like for the organization and what does it look like for that employee? These two things don’t necessarily need to directly align, but they certainly shouldn’t be in conflict.

Structure the program to drive impact.

The way you organize a coaching program can directly impact the results. So you want the structure of the program to align with the goals and metrics you defined. One of the most important characteristics of our coaching programs that many of our clients haven’t considered before is manager integration. This is especially important for junior employees who may require additional managerial support to integrate their coaching into their daily tasks. We actively involve the manager in the coaching process through triad meetings with the manager, coachee and coach at the beginning, middle and end of the engagement. This approach can ensure that everyone is aligned and that the coaching addresses both the individual’s needs and organizational goals by directly incorporating manager feedback.

Another crucial factor for younger employees is the curriculum that underpins the coaching process. When working with executives, coaching can be a bit more free-flowing with the coachee, giving them choice of topics and the opportunity to address immediate training needs. Younger employees often struggle to make the most of their coaching sessions and may be unsure of what topics to discuss. L&D professionals should develop a flexible framework or curriculum that not only focuses on essential career development skills but also adapts to the coachees’ needs in real-time.

Many organizations may design ad-hoc coaching sessions to be used as needed by young employees. What typically happens in this case is a small subset of employees takes advantage of the offering, and there can be lack of followthrough. When wanting coaching to serve more as a benefit or perk, this can be an aligned structure. If there are specific behavioral changes you’d like to see among young employees, a fixed session format may be a better choice.

If doing a cohort-based program, it can generally help for the organization to provide group-based learning in addition to one-on-one work. Junior employees want to know that they’re not alone, and they like learning from each other.

Select the right participants.

Coachee selection, like program design, should align with the goals of the program. Maybe your focus is on retaining top talent and so you develop a program for your high potentials or perhaps the focus is succession planning and so you coach employees who are nearing promotion. The common denominator for selection is employees who want to learn and grow.

You may also consider a nomination and/or application process. As an example, managers nominate candidates who meet the criteria (e.g., a certain rating or tenure) and then nominated employees complete an application. This can help demonstrate commitment and identifies serious candidates.

Provide appropriate context to your coaching partners.

It’s crucial that your coaches feel like an extension of your team and have appropriate context to be able to seamlessly integrate into your culture and initiatives.

One of the first things we when working with a new partner is the “culture download.” This is a way for our stakeholders to transfer knowledge to us about things like current initiatives, their performance management system, hot buttons among employees and any defined leadership competencies. This way we can train each coach on these topics so that they can be reinforced in the coaching work.

Communicate thoughtfully and get buy-in.

As with most large organizational initiatives, the communication around the program is what makes or breaks it. First it’s important to communicate why these individuals were selected. There still may be some fear lingering, so the message needs to be clear that this is an investment not punitive.

The next thing to be crystal clear on is what’s expected of the coachee. We typically require coachees to sign an agreement acknowledging these factors which helps send the message that this is a valuable and serious investment and commitment. You’ll want to speak directly to how to get the most out of the coaching engagement, including providing feedback to their coach. For many clients, it could be their first time working with a coach. Training them on how to use this resource is key.

And of course these messages should all be reinforced by, or better yet should come from,  senior leadership, not just human resources (HR) or L&D.  It’s very powerful to do a kick off with coachees where the chief experience officer (CXO) can join, build them up and explain why they’re being invested in and how important this program is. People should feel proud to be participating in this program.

Deliberate coach pairing.

Most people intuitively think the best coach for them is someone who has had the exact same career path. That may in some scenarios be valuable, but the most critical factors are alignment in personality and approach.

If you’re someone who needs a list and a lot of structure, you may not work best with a coach who has a more free-flowing approach. We have found that the order of importance in coach pairing is style, identity and then relevant experience.

It’s important to ask the coachee the right questions to help make coach pairings.

Wrapping Up

Your first selection of coaches should be employees who are excited about learning. These are your advocates of change who will trailblaze the initiative in the future. Select people who are willing to give feedback and try new things so that the program can be enhanced for the next cohort.

You may need to iterate a few times to get the logistics exactly right, but a well-designed, intentional coaching program for young employees can quickly become a cornerstone of your L&D repertoire.