Who should sponsor coaching in an organisation?

It should be helpful to the coachee, the coach and the Organisation for there to be someone inside the Organisation who cares about the coachee benefiting from the coaching process. Clearly the coachee must be committed and motivated to achieve a positive and effective outcome for themselves or the whole process will not be worthwhile. In most coaching relationships this is already the case but in some others it is not. In some coaching assignments that I have been involved in the coachee is their own sponsor and this has usually worked very well. These have usually been chief executives, directors or owner managers of their businesses who have perceived the need, owned the budget to finance the sessions and found me as the coach that they have wanted to work with. They have usually been committed to the COACH’ing process and have their own self generated goals and objectives that they have worked on with me. The only disadvantage of this dual role is that they may not have a good personal monitoring system and the objectivity provided by someone else in the Organisation outside our coaching relationship who cares about their learning progress and performance as it relates to the coaching work. In these coaching relationships it puts more emphasis on me as the coach to look out for indicators that demonstrate whether the coachee really is learning and acting, to encourage them to reflect on their progress and to look for feedback from other sources eg their Board or their marketplace. I also need to be careful not to make these coaching relationships too friendly and comfortable or to collude with them and become overly sympathetic.

The role of the sponsor in these coaching relationships is to understand about the coachee and their circumstances, to see what the potential learning and development outcomes are for them that would benefit the organisation and to have a view about how and why coaching would be an appropriate solution for them. It also helps if they have a budget to fund the coaching, care about the coachee achieving a positive outcome and bother to take an appropriate interest in the process as it progresses. They often help by providing objective measurement indicators to demonstrate progress and performance – especially if the coachee understands and buys in to them!

Where the sponsor sometimes plays an unhelpful role in this coaching process is when they think that they can use a coach to get the coachee to do or to be something covertly that they have not openly explained to the coachee. This places the coach in the role of attempting to manipulate the coachee into a way of thinking or acting that they are not aware of or committed to. If you believe that this is the sponsor’s agenda in the early stages of the briefing process then it is your responsibility to bring these objectives out onto the surface and to check with the coachee whether or not they understand, agree with and want to work to achieve the sponsor’s objectives.