Measuring coaching ROI.
Without the guesswork.

Why measurement is so hard (and why most teams fake it).

Here's the uncomfortable truth about measuring coaching ROI: most organizations don't do it well. Not because they don't care, but because coaching is genuinely harder to measure than most business investments. The outcomes are behavioral (how someone leads differently), the timeline is long (months, not weeks), and the causal chain is indirect (coaching improves a manager, who improves a team, who improves retention, which saves money).

Compare that to measuring a marketing campaign. You spend money, you get clicks, you track conversions, you calculate return. Clean. Linear. Leadership development doesn't work that way. The best you can do is build a rigorous case using converging evidence, not a single silver-bullet metric.

The result? Most L&D teams either avoid measurement altogether ("coaching is qualitative, you can't put a number on it") or they rely on vanity metrics that don't survive executive scrutiny. Neither approach protects the budget when the CFO starts asking hard questions.

Impact becomes guesswork. And guesswork doesn't survive budget season.

The metrics everyone uses that don't prove anything.

These metrics aren't useless. They're necessary for program management. But they don't answer the question your CEO is actually asking, which is: "Is this making our leaders better, and is that worth what we're spending?"

A practical measurement framework.

Forget trying to calculate a single ROI number for coaching. That precision is misleading at best and dishonest at worst. Instead, build a measurement approach across three layers, each providing a different type of evidence that coaching is producing value.

The power of this framework is that it gives you something credible to report at every stage. You don't have to wait twelve months to answer "is this working?" Leading indicators appear within weeks. Competency data emerges over months. Business outcomes confirm the trajectory over quarters. Each layer builds on the one before it.

Leading indicators: is the coaching taking hold?

These are the earliest signals that coaching is producing change. They won't convince a CFO on their own, but they tell you whether the program is on the right track or needs adjustment.

Engagement and follow-through

Not just "did they attend?" but "are they actively engaged between sessions?" Are leaders bringing specific situations to coaching? Are they completing commitments they made with their coach? Are session notes showing progressively deeper conversations? Active engagement correlates with outcomes in ways that attendance alone does not.

Coach-observed behavior shifts

Trained coaches are skilled observers of change. They can report (at the aggregate level, never identifying individuals) patterns like: "70% of coachees have shifted from avoiding difficult conversations to initiating them" or "leaders in the delegation cohort are showing measurable improvement in their ability to define outcomes rather than prescribe tasks." This is more credible than self-report because the observer is trained and external.

Qualitative feedback with specificity

Generic feedback ("coaching was great!") tells you nothing. Specific feedback tells you everything. "I used the framework from coaching to restructure how I run my team meetings, and my team said the meetings are more focused now." That level of specificity indicates actual application, not just satisfaction. Design your feedback collection to elicit specifics, not ratings.

Manager observations

The coached leader's manager is one of the best sources of evidence. "Sarah has been much more direct in her communication with the team since starting coaching" carries more weight than any self-assessment. Giving managers a simple framework to observe and report on development themes (without exposing coaching content) creates a powerful data source.

Lagging indicators: is it moving the business?

These are the outcomes that executives care about. They take longer to materialize, and they're influenced by many factors beyond coaching. But when you can show correlation between coaching investment and business outcomes, the argument for continued investment becomes much stronger.

Competency growth tracking: the missing middle.

This is the layer most coaching programs are missing entirely, and it's arguably the most valuable. Competency tracking sits between leading indicators ("is the coaching engaging?") and lagging indicators ("did the business improve?"). It answers the most specific question: are leaders actually building the capabilities we're developing them on?

How it works

At the start of a coaching engagement, you map development goals to specific competencies: feedback delivery, delegation, strategic thinking, conflict management, executive presence, whatever the organization and the individual need. The coach observes progress against these competencies over time, based on the situations the leader brings to coaching and how they handle them.

This creates a development record that's objective (based on coach observation, not self-assessment), longitudinal (tracked over months, showing trajectory), and connected to the organization's leadership framework (mapped to the competencies that actually matter for the business).

Why this is powerful

Competency growth data lets you say things like: "Across our manager cohort, average competency scores in feedback delivery improved from 2.3 to 3.8 over six months of coaching." That's not a satisfaction score. That's not attendance. That's verified capability growth in a specific skill the organization identified as critical. Try cutting that budget.

Visibility without surveillance. See what's changing across your leadership population without compromising what makes coaching work.

The confidentiality balancing act.

Here's the paradox every organization faces: the more data you collect about coaching, the better you can prove ROI. But the more you surveil coaching, the less effective it becomes. Coaching works because it's a safe space. When leaders worry that what they say will be reported to their manager or HR, they stop being honest. And coaching without honesty is just performance theater.

The solution isn't to choose between measurement and confidentiality. It's to measure at the right level of aggregation.

The principle: organizations see the forest. Individuals own the trees. A leader can choose to share their coaching insights with their manager. The system should never do it for them.

Building the business case for leadership coaching.

Whether you're proposing a new coaching program or defending an existing one, the business case follows the same structure. Lead with the problem, connect coaching to the solution, and show how you'll measure progress.

Step 1: Name the business problem

Don't start with "we should invest in coaching." Start with what's broken. "We promoted 40 new managers last year. Engagement scores in their teams dropped an average of 8 points. Three teams lost their top performer within six months of the promotion. The estimated cost of that turnover alone is $600K." Now you have a problem worth solving.

Step 2: Connect coaching to the problem

Explain why coaching is the right intervention for this specific problem. Not "coaching is generally good for leaders" but "new managers struggle because the transition from IC to people leader requires entirely different skills. Coaching provides the individualized practice and accountability that workshops and training programs can't. Here's the research that supports this approach."

Step 3: Show what you'll measure and when

This is where most proposals fall apart. Don't promise "improved leadership." Promise specific metrics at specific timeframes: "At 90 days, we'll measure coaching engagement depth and coach-observed behavior shifts. At six months, we'll compare engagement scores in coached vs. uncoached managers' teams. At twelve months, we'll analyze retention trends." The specificity signals that you're serious about accountability.

Step 4: Anchor to the cost of inaction

The most powerful business case isn't about what coaching costs. It's about what doing nothing costs. Manager-driven turnover. Disengaged teams. Underperforming leaders in critical roles. Failed promotions that require external hires at 2-3x the cost. When the cost of the status quo is clear, the coaching investment looks small by comparison.

How Boon measures impact.

Measurement isn't a feature we bolted on. It's built into how the entire platform works. When an organization uses Boon, measurement happens as a natural byproduct of the coaching itself, not as extra work for coaches, coachees, or L&D teams.

Competency-mapped coaching. Every coaching engagement starts with development goals mapped to specific competencies. As coaching progresses, coaches track growth against these competencies based on real coaching conversations. This creates a longitudinal view of capability development that organizations can access at the aggregate level through the customer portal.

Manager visibility, not surveillance. Managers can see that their direct report is engaged in coaching, what competency areas they're focused on, and the general trajectory of their development. They never see session content, specific challenges discussed, or individual competency scores. This gives managers enough context to support development without undermining confidentiality.

Theme-level organizational intelligence. Across your entire coaching population, Boon surfaces patterns: the most common development themes, where leaders are growing fastest, where they're getting stuck, and how different cohorts compare. This isn't data for data's sake. It tells L&D teams where to invest more, where to create supplementary programming, and what's working across the board.

Integrated with your existing data. Coaching data becomes powerful when it connects to what you already track. Combine Boon's competency growth data with your engagement survey results, retention metrics, and promotion data, and you have a complete picture of how coaching is contributing to business outcomes.

Frequently asked questions