How to choose the right leadership coaching platform?

Your coaching journey can make a lot of difference for your team. Plus, with more use of AI and other advanced tech, manager and leader development coaching solutions are becoming more common than ever. Plenty of platforms offer everything you could dream of – remarkable coaches, personal touches, one-on-one sessions, and more. The question is: which coaching platform is the best one for you? Keep in mind that not all teams and managers are made alike; coaching needs differ. So, what works best for your friend’s team may not work for you.

In this blog, we will discuss choosing the right leadership coaching platform for your team. Look for tips on using your chosen platform effectively to maximize its benefits.

Searching the Right Leadership Coaching Platform for Your Team

When searching for the perfect coaching platform for your team, there are several vital points to remember. We have covered the top ten things you should consider before investing in a leadership development platform below:

#1 Evaluate Platform Usability and Accessibility

Step one is picking a platform that’s easy to use. After all, you want to retain people and ensure they fully use the product. For this area, think of metrics that can explain usability and accessibility. First, you need to look at the overall look and feel of the platform. Does it align with your existing systems? Or would it be hard to learn as a new tool?

The easier it is to get around and the more accessible it is, the more likely people will use it and stick with it. This makes the whole coaching journey better for all team members involved. Platforms that consider everyone in the workforce by including features that meet different needs help unite everyone. You should aim for simple but effective platforms where everything works smoothly on any device because this helps keep everyone engaged and learning well.

Explore learn journeys on Risely to see these principles in action. Tailor made with experts curating the content and AI empowering distribution across your team: How Risely trains leaders?

#2 Assess the Breadth and Depth of Coaching Content

Second, check the depth of the content. Here’s the thing: your organization has managers and leaders at different levels of understanding. Does the leadership coaching platform offer content to cater to each level? Can it explain one concept at varying levels of understanding and experience? You want something that covers all sorts of leadership skills, like talking well with others and knowing how to handle talent.

Ensure it has enough material for everyone, from the top bosses to every team member. The right one should guide each person toward reaching their best through learning paths made just for them. With this in mind, see if what the platform offers matches your team’s needs to grow professionally and meet business goals.

#3 Check In-built Features for Tracking Progress

A complete leadership development platform needs to offer much more than a list of courses and modules to complete. After all, you need to measure what your team learns. For that, features like in-built skill assessments, as Risely provides for nearly 20 core people management areas are important.

For example, a self-assessment on active listening can tell you about changes in that area, and the team’s score tells you about the observed change. A few other platforms integrate personality assessments instead. And yet, the game does not end at assessing; you need a dashboard to make sense of the metrics you view.

A good leadership coaching platform will empower you to track growth on specific skills over time, growth of specific team members, and improvements over specific people management challenges. Competitive benchmarking across the platform and within the organization are also great features that complement built-in assessments and motivate users to keep progressing.

Wondering how it works? Try an assessment now, it’s free! Leadership skill assessments by Risely

#4 Understand Integration Capabilities with Existing Systems

No one loves switching applications multiple times a day, least of all, buggy or unfamiliar ones. Thus, when picking out a coaching platform, it’s super important to see how well it can work with your existing systems. You want everything to blend nicely so that switching over is easy and you get the most out of what the leadership coaching platform offers.

For instance, Risely offers seamless integrations with workspaces like Teams and Slack so that coaching support is available at the moment of need. There are no extra steps needed to access help. Go for platforms that sync up without a fuss with what you’ve got now, making things more efficient and effective.

#5 Identify Customization Options for Personalized Learning Paths

Can sales and technical managers find equal value in the same leadership training? Likely not. In fact, one of the major reasons why training fails is that it fails to meet the contextual needs of the audience. So, what a sales manager wants will be different from what a technical manager wants, and neither can be neglected in your organization.

There are many ways to personalize coaching experiences on a leadership development platform. For example, Risely’s learning journeys are different for each user. They are based on the initial questions about challenges and context answered by them. Similarly, personalization is a great feature to support managers through career transitions.

Suppose someone on your team is moving from managing three people to twenty. While they have the skills, they will need fine-tuning and support to executive effectively, which Merlin’s personalization can offer. This way of personalizing things makes getting better at leadership more direct and effective.

#6 Find a Fit for the Coach and Your Team

The fact remains that human coaches can only do so much. Most coaches come with specific and niche expertise, either in a specific skill or a specific context at work. What your team needs is a diversity of ability and adaptability. Think back to the sales and tech managers – can one coach do justice to them? An AI coach like Merlin can provide this because it has expertise garnered through large amounts of data as well as the ability to continuously keep learning.

Plus, with coaches, the question of building a relationship and being available rises inevitably. At Risely, we solve this with a unique solution. We have Merlin, an in-built AI coach trained to offer context-based coaching. You can explore it in voice mode with support for over 40 languages, ask questions anytime you want, and even do role plays and reviews of conversations. Here’s an example for you:

#7 Check for a Robust Analytics and Reporting Dashboard

It’s all about metrics, and we are here to ensure that you are keeping an eye on the right ones. When picking out a leadership coaching platform, it’s really important to look at how good its analytics and reporting section is. With this feature, you can monitor how your team members are doing, see if their leadership skills are improving, and ensure that the coaching is helping reach business goals in a smart way.

Plus, not every stakeholder wants the same metrics. As their goals differ, so do the numbers they track!

What metrics do they like?

Having detailed analytics, such as Risely offers in the Admin view, lets you understand more about skill development, which means managing talent based on actual data. Good reporting tools also let you figure out if the money spent on coaching is worth it by looking at the return on investment (ROI), making it easier for everyone in the organization to make decisions backed up by facts.

#8 Consider Pricing Models and Return on Investment

How much are you willing to shell out for leadership development? A one-on-one session with a seasoned coach would start from $200 an hour, and it can go up to $1000. Let’s take a different turn; this three-day workshop looks amazing. The cost? $2500 per person. It’s not so ideal for all the managers on your team who would benefit. Money matters, and that’s why there is so much to consider before picking the right leadership coaching platform for your team. The steep costs associated with conventional leadership development methods often limit accessibility.

You should also consider how this choice might improve leadership skills and make the whole team perform better. Go for a leadership development platform that boosts professional growth throughout your company and gives good value back compared to what you spend on it—this is known as getting a favorable return on investment (ROI) on training. Looking into these things carefully will guide you toward investing wisely.

#9 Explore Support and Community Engagement Features

Engagement is critical to the success of management and leadership development programs. In fact, lectures, the most typical form of training, show lowest retention of content among learners as per the works of education specialist Edgar Dale. Thus, your search also needs to focus on how the leadership development platform provides support and gets everyone involved. This kind of setup really helps people grow professionally together. You should look for places where team members can talk, share what they’ve been through, and learn as a group.

Community support improves the coaching journey because it gives your team a safe place to talk things out and get feedback. Good support keeps your team motivated throughout the process. Go for leadership coaching platforms that engage everyone so your team can keep learning and growing.

#10 Assess User Reviews and Success Stories

How to Implement Your Chosen Leadership Coaching Platform?

Once you’ve picked the perfect leadership coaching platform for your team, it’s all about how you roll it out. Here are four major steps that you should take:

Plan for a Smooth Rollout

Start by marking important steps and picking a team (or specific members) to handle the rollout. Your first task is ensuring everyone knows what’s happening at every step. To deal with any pushback, use strategies that help manage changes smoothly. In addition, run training sessions so people can get comfortable using the new platform.

It’s also crucial to have support ready and ways for people to share their thoughts to improve things as we go along. Getting leaders on board is key to getting everyone else excited and clear about what we expect during this whole process. At this stage, remain in touch with the team building the leadership development platform, too, because you will need to exchange queries and ideas.

Encourage Adoption Among Leaders and Teams

The success of leadership development and growth programs depends on multiple stakeholders, and some of them can impact the processes much more than others. Senior leaders and team managers are the influencers who can inspire others to use the platform extensively by setting up the right examples. As a result, getting them onboard becomes important for multiple reasons:

• They are involved in getting budgets and permissions
• They can influence adoption
• They can help you overcome resistance and build consensus

To get leaders and their teams on board, it’s key to talk about how the leadership coaching platform can really help boost leadership skills, meet career ambitions, and push professional development forward. Point out that this tool gives senior leaders a way to lead their team members toward achieving everything they’re capable of. It’s important to keep conversations about the coaching journey open so everyone feels comfortable growing personally.

Read more: How to Obtain Buy-In for Training from Stakeholders?

Integrate Feedback Loops for Continuous Improvement

What your team has to say about the leadership coaching platform matters greatly. Because, after all, they are the users and beneficiaries. When we listen to feedback from these, people in charge can get even better at their jobs, helping them grow personally and professionally. As the leader of such an initiative, you must monitor the feedback. You can do this in many ways:

• First up, straight away, go and ask. Get the reactions from participants in informal conversations so that they are comfortable expressing opinions on their own terms. It’s a no-pressure way to gather feedback on training that you can use to establish yourself as the enabler of their development.
• Second, you can use training evaluation programs. The survey questions are typically designed to briefly describe the experience. It covers everyone and allows you to understand experiences along a standard set of metrics at scale.
• Third, look at the usage data. How many people are completing the goals? Are they sharing their achievements? Is your team meeting deadlines? All of these indicate the level of enthusiasm about the leadership coaching platform.
• Lastly, you can also take up focus group style interviews, where you sit with some team members and discuss the leadership development platform in-depth. This exercise would be great if you could generate ideas for custom features or use cases to integrate into the executive coaching platform.

Having open talks regularly and checking how things are going often ensures that leadership skills keep getting sharper, leading to overall success in work.

Measure Impact on Leadership Development

To really understand if a leadership coaching platform is doing its job in boosting leadership skills, it’s crucial to look at the correct numbers that show how leaders are growing. You can see where progress is happening by keeping an eye on specific metrics that match up with what makes a good leader.

It’s also important to check if the money spent on this training is worth it by looking at returns on investment (ROI). Looking into how many people leave their jobs, whether goals for the business align with what’s being taught, and if your team members feel more connected after getting coached helps, too. Using analytics lets us keep track of all these things to tweak our approach as needed. Making choices based on solid data helps ensure we’re always improving at developing leadership within our company.

What’s more, along with learning metrics, there are more data points that you will need to be an impactful L&D leader. Think of what your team asks from you – completion rates? Participant engagement rates? Goal achievement? All of these further tie into the business metrics (reduced absenteeism, higher productivity, lower turnover, etc.) that define your value. By measuring these effectively, you can make a compelling case for the business impact of L&D.

If you have read so far, we know you care. Check out Risely and get in touch to create a custom offering for your team’s needs. Start your journey with a free trial for 14 days today, and hit us up the moment you get WOW’ed at [email protected]

Conclusion

To wrap things up, picking the right leadership coaching platform is essential to boost how well your team does and grows. You’ve got to look at a bunch of metrics like how easy it is to use, what kind of content it offers, whether it can work with other systems, ways you can make it fit your needs better, analytics tools available for tracking progress on the leadership development platform as well as pricing structures and feedback from other users.

After choosing one that fits best for leadership development efforts in your organization, ensure everything goes smoothly by carefully planning its introduction phase, encouraging everyone to get on board, taking into account any suggestions they might have along the way, and keeping an eye out on how much difference this makes in improving leadership skills fostering teamwork among members leading towards greater success across the whole company.