Stop Funding Coaching You Can't Prove Works

Coaching is having a moment — the market has grown more than 60% since 2019, and a third of Fortune 500 companies are now paying for executive coaching. But when most leaders are asked whether their coaching program is actually working, the confidence disappears fast.

In this episode, Vanessa Milara Alzate sits down with Jordan Rawlinson, Learning and Performance Manager at Kirkpatrick Partners and author of the coaching chapter in Building a Culture of Evaluation: The New Kirkpatrick Model for Performance and Innovation, to make the case that coaching is measurable — it just requires a different lens than training.

Jordan explains why the coach-coachee relationship, known as the working alliance, predicts coaching success more than any technique or model. They dig into why Level 1 Reaction, usually treated as the least important level in training, may be the most foundational level in coaching. And they talk candidly about why coaching should never be mandatory, what has to be true in a culture before coaching can take root, and how to move coaching from a nice-to-have perk to a funded, evaluated strategy.

Takeaways: what the working alliance is and why it predicts outcomes, how to build measurement into a self-directed process, why voluntold coaching backfires, and where to start if you want to evaluate your own coaching program.

Learn more and get the book at kirkpatrickpartners.com

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Building a Culture of Evaluation Order the book behind the Culture of Evaluation framework and updated Kirkpatrick Model. The book comes with a Companion Guide to help support you on the journey.

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