Imagine for a moment that your company had left it up to its line managers to decide how to invest in information technology. Some went with Windows, others with Mac OS and an adventurous few leaped into Linux. But each manager operated in isolation. Corporate had no way to determine which of those IT spends actually added value to the organization.

Crazy, right? No company would dare allow a vital tool to be employed in such an ad hoc fashion. But that’s exactly what many organizations are doing with coaching. Worldwide, organizations and individual executives will spend about $1.5 billion on coaching in 2007, according to the International Coach Federation in Lexington, Kentucky, and most of that money will go to one-off engagements initiated in piecemeal fashion.

If coaching in your company is an improvisational affair, apply the following five steps to make it the measurable performance tool it can and should be.

1. Articulate objectives. Coaching used to be a tool for turning around poor-performing or bad-behaving executives. But today, coaching more often is called upon to help strong performers move their game to the next level. And it’s as likely to be used by managers in the middle ranks as it is by those in the top tiers. Coaching is even becoming a routine part of the onboarding process, according to the ICF.

With this greater range of use comes the risk that coaching will be misaligned with an organization’s talent-management objectives. So the first step is to articulate how it should serve your talent-management strategy: Should it focus on expanding skills in the senior ranks? Making management transitions less disruptive? Building bench strength to facilitate rapid growth?

Establishing specific parameters up-front will make it much easier to keep your new or improved coaching program in check as you move ahead.

2. Define the details. Once your coaching program’s overall objectives have been nailed down, define specifics:

§          Who merits coaching in your organization and under what circumstances?

§          Will you use internal coaches or engage external ones?

§          Will coachees commit to an action plan or a contract?

§          Will sessions be confidential, or will coaches be obligated to report sensitive information to management?

§          How will you measure the engagement’s success? What will be the consequences of failure?

3. Screen coaches carefully. This step is no less crucial to the success of your coaching program than interviewing job candidates is to your company’s overall success. But many HR departments fail at this step and are then surprised at the inconsistent results that follow, says Kate Ludeman, founder and CEO of the Round Rock, Texas-based coaching firm Worth Ethic Corp.

Whether the coaches you hire are independent contractors or employees of a global coaching organization, their experience and expertise need to line up with your coaching program’s overall objectives. Ludeman suggests asking prospective coaches to describe how they have helped organizations facing issues similar to the ones facing yours. It’s critical that they be able to marshal evidence that their tools and approaches actually work and that they can adapt them to your organization.

4. Establish a partnership with your coaches. For coaching to support your company’s talent-management objectives, coaches need to understand those objectives, the corporation’s structure and key executives, and the overall corporate culture. Susan Ennis, principal of the Boston-based consultancy Susan Ennis & Associates, recommends creating a standard orientation session for new coaches. But, she says, don’t stop there: Communicate regularly with them both by phone and in person about the business and its goals. Doing so will help them do a better job and quite possibly do it faster.

5. Measure coaching’s outcomes. Return on investment is a difficult concept to apply to any talent-management endeavor, and coaching is no exception. “For a training program,” says Ennis, “you can measure how many people attained a certain level of knowledge. But coaching is much more private in nature, and there’s no cut-and-dried way to measure it.”

Assessing a program’s overall effectiveness is dependent on how clearly its objectives have been defined and then establishing “reasonable proxies” to measure success against those objectives, says Ennis. Say, for instance, that a primary goal of your coaching program is developing high potentials and building their loyalty to the company. Measuring retention then becomes a reasonable proxy for measuring the program’s success.

Coaching is no different from any other performance-improvement or talent-management tool in that its effectiveness is closely tied to how clearly its goals are articulated. The more precisely an organization can define what it wants from its coaching program, the greater the chances that the program’s results will meet expectations. 

Andrew Park is a freelance business journalist who contributes to BusinessWeek, Fast Company and The New York Times.

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