Walnut.coach’s Post

Most coaching platforms give CHROs an attendance report. We think that's a lie of omission. Attendance tells you someone showed up. It doesn't tell you whether their active listening got better, whether they actually delegate now, or whether they can hold a difficult conversation under pressure. Those are separate questions — and none of them are answered by a completion rate. Every skill worth coaching has Core Principles underneath it. Active listening has six. Delegation has six. Difficult conversations have six. A manager doesn't "learn" active listening in one session — they move, principle by principle, across months. Sometimes they improve on three and regress on one. That's how real behaviour change looks. So the question CHROs should be asking coaching vendors isn't "how many sessions were attended?" It's: → Which of the 6 Core Principles of [skill] has this cohort moved on this month? → Which principle are we still weakest on? → Where is the coach's time actually producing shift? That's a measurement layer, not an attendance report. It's harder to build. It's also the only way to put a number on coaching ROI without fudging it. If you're evaluating coaching vendors this quarter, make them show you their measurement framework before their price list. The answer will tell you what they think coaching actually is. What's the last coaching engagement where you saw principle-level progress — not just a satisfaction score? #Walnut #WalnutCoach #CHRO #HRLeaders #CoachingROI #LearningAndDevelopment #ExecutiveCoaching #BehaviouralChange #PeopleStrategy #LDLeaders

Teams rarely ask for coaching. They send signals — and most of them look like ordinary busyness. Five we've learned to read: → Your strongest individual contributor was just promoted, and has gone quiet. The skill that earned the title isn't the skill the title now demands. → Decisions that used to take a day now take a week. Not because the work got harder, but because no one wants to own the call. → The same two names surface in every escalation. The manager is absorbing conflict instead of building a team that can handle its own. → Your engagement score looks fine on average and reads brutal in the free-text comments. Averages hide the one team that's a single resignation away from breaking. → People are leaving for "growth" — into roles that, on paper, look identical to the ones they left. None of these are performance problems. They're capability gaps, and training doesn't close them — because training ends at the workshop, and the behaviour lives on Tuesday afternoon. Here's the part that matters for HR: you can finally see it. We track movement across the 6 Core Principles (P1–P6) of every skill a manager works on — so "they got better" stops being a feeling and becomes something you can put in front of a CFO. The ICF Global Coaching Client Study, conducted by PwC, put the median return at 7× the investment. The number was never the hard part. Proving it was. Which of these five do you see most often on your teams? #Coaching #FirstTimeManagers #LeadershipDevelopment #HRLeaders #CHRO

We speak to lots of organisations who say they want a coaching culture. But, as we dig in, it’s clear they’re looking for a quick-fix coaching-light version. And that’s risky … A coaching culture is not: ❌ A toolkit of questions (usually badly applied, pointless) ❌ A lunch-and-learn on ‘coaching skills’ (woefully inadequate) ❌ Everybody coaching everybody else (chaos!) ❌ Leaders sprinkling coach-speak into conversations (cringe) To build a coaching culture you need four things: 1. Capability A coaching culture starts with people who can actually coach – trained coaches (internal or external) who are professionally trained and understand presence, boundaries, ethics and how to evoke new thinking. 2. Psychological Safety Coaching only works when people feel safe to think out loud, explore uncertainty and be honest about what’s really going on. 3. A Coach Approach to Leadership A coach approach to leadership transcends just using a 'coaching style'. It's about skills, knowledge and mindset. It's about asking without telling, listening without fixing, creating space rather than filling it, empowering rather than rescuing. 4.    A coaching ecosystem The sophisticated coaching culture includes: internal coaches, external coaches, leaders with a coach approach, clear ethical frameworks, supervision and support. Where are you currently at with your coaching culture? Quick-fixing or sophisticating? Or somewhere in between? Let me know in the comments.