Can you Measure the Benefit of Coaching?
By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group
A client I coached over a year ago, let's call her Janet, sent me a message a few weeks ago that I wasn't expecting. Janet's client had come into a meeting upset about her team's analysis. The numbers were right, the conclusions were sound, the issues were cosmetic. Formatting and decimal points that changed nothing. Janet's instinct was to say exactly that.
Then she remembered something we had talked about. She paused instead. She asked a few questions and figured out that the client's boss was the real issue, someone who equated how a document looked with how trustworthy it was. The client wasn't angry about decimals. They were anxious about what was coming. So Janet listened, understood the real concern, and agreed on formatting principles that protected the integrity of the work and gave the client something to stand behind.
The meeting ended well. Janet told me she almost said the wrong thing, and then didn't. She wasn't sure why she was telling me. I was glad she did.
The Coach Plants the Seed
That moment didn't happen in a session. It happened months later, in a client meeting I wasn't at, during a situation nobody scripted. What showed up wasn't a technique Janet remembered. It was a different instinct. The pause had become natural.
That's how coaching actually works. You plant a seed. You tend it for a while, together. And then the coach leaves, and the growing continues on its own. Sometimes the coachee doesn't even connect the moment back to the work. It just feels like the right thing to do.
Good coaching changes how you feel in a room. It changes the voice in your head when things get hard. It gives you language for what you've been sensing for years. Once you have that language, you use it for the rest of your career.
Then Someone Asks for the Data
I'm in a WhatsApp group with dozens of other coaches. A few weeks ago someone asked if anyone had solid research on measuring the impact of coaching. It's a question buyers ask constantly. I decided to do my own digging. I went ahead and built a research summary using AI, I read it back, rewrote it, and compared it with what I actually believed.
The research is real and worth knowing. Multiple rigorous meta-analyses consistently find that coaching produces a meaningful positive effect on behavioral change. Leaders who go through coaching improve more than comparable leaders who don't. The science says coaching works. I believe it.
The problem starts when someone tries to reduce that to a clean number. You'll see ROI figures everywhere in coaching literature. Seven times the investment. Eighty-six percent of companies reporting positive returns. These numbers come almost entirely from retrospective surveys asking people who finished coaching whether they thought it was worth it. What you're left with is a number that feels precise and tells you almost nothing.
Here's my perspective. The pause that saved a client relationship eight months after the last session, the conversation that didn't go sideways, the decision made differently in a room the coach never entered. None of that fits in a survey. None of that is easy to measure, and note of that ends up in an ROI calculation. But all of it is real, and all of it matters.
The Tree Keeps Growing
The coach leaves before most of the fruit appears. That's not a flaw in the model. That's the design.
So what can you measure? Set clear behavioral goals at the start. Ask the people around the leader whether they're seeing something different six months later. Check if the change is still showing up after the engagement ends. That's honest. That's useful. That's as close to the truth as we're going to get.
But don't confuse what you can measure with what is actually happening.
Janet didn't frame what she did as coaching. She didn't think, "my coach taught me to pause." She just paused. The seed had become the soil. That's what makes this so hard to measure and so easy to undervalue. The best outcomes don't look like outcomes. They look like someone finally acting like themselves.