Building

Leaders
At Scale
How do you develop & retain
your highest-performing
employees and leaders?
This is the question that weighs on every organization. But there’s
good news. Research from the Association for Talent
Table of Contents:
Development suggests that investing in learning and
development (L&D) opportunities is the key to a loyal, engaged Defining leadership coaching and mentoring 3
workforce. Two L&D strategies, in particular, have boomed in
The benefits of leadership coaching and mentoring 3
popularity over the past few years: leadership coaching and
mentorship. Leadership Coaching and Mentoring: What does my business need? 4

How to select a leadership development platform 5

In this guide to building leaders at scale, we’ll first define
Designing a coaching and mentoring program that works 6
leadership coaching and mentoring as we see them at Torch.
Next, we’ll explore the benefits that both leadership coaching and Determining ROI of your program 8
mentoring can bring to your organization. We’ve included some
common scenarios in which leadership coaching and mentoring
can provide support in the section “Leadership Coaching and
Mentoring: What does my business need?” Lastly, we run through
a checklist for selecting a leadership development platform and
how to design a coaching and mentoring program that works,
including determining your return on investment.

We hope this proves to be a useful resource when it comes to

building a plan to develop and retain the top-performing people
at your organization.
Defining leadership The benefits of leadership
coaching and mentoring coaching and mentoring
At Torch, we view coaching and mentoring as philosophically similar. At the core of each Positive behavior change
practice is the relationship between two people. The methods might differ between coaching
Leadership coaching and mentoring can lead to improved
and mentoring, but both are about helping people get where they want to go by leveraging
behaviors, which can result in positive outcomes such as
the experience of the coach or mentor.
increased self confidence and more frequent promotions.
Coaching is a development-focused relationship with a specially trained coach who
provides guidance to a client on their goals and helps them reach their full potential.
Increased productivity
Mentoring is a development-focused relationship with a domain relevant mentor who Leadership coaching that includes goal setting and feedback has
passes on their skills and experience to a mentee. been shown to increase productivity by up to 88%. Similarly, 84%
of individuals who received mentoring reported becoming
proficient in their roles faster.

Improved retention
A Deloitte study found that mentoring has a positive impact on
the retention of millennial employees. Employees at companies
with strong coaching cultures have also been found to be
significantly more engaged than those at organizations who do
not, which is a significant factor in retention.

Greater well-being
People who received leadership coaching reported greater
workplace well-being and resilience, and 91% of individuals who
have a mentor are satisfied with their jobs.

Better relationships
Both leadership coaching and mentoring have been shown to
lead to improvements in workplace relationships.
Leadership You have high potential
employees to develop and
retain
You are focused on
succession planning

Coaching and
Providing a new leader with a coach or
Providing high potential employees with a mentor during succession planning shows
dedicated coach or mentor gives them a the employee that you are committed to

Mentoring:
resource devoted entirely to their their success.
development.

You have a diversity and

What does my You have an existing

development program
that could be enhanced
inclusion initiative you
want to expand or begin

business need?
With coaches and mentors, you can focus on
Coaching and mentoring provide an developing certain groups to create a more
important one-on-one component to any diverse and inclusive workplace. A coach or
program focused on employee development. a mentor can often support the acquisition
of strategic knowledge that is less accessible
to historically underrepresented groups
There are many scenarios in which leadership coaching and You have new managers inside of organizations. Also, coaches and
mentoring can provide support. Outlined here are a few common
to train mentors often provide feedback that is
harder for members of under-represented
reasons you might consider leadership coaching and mentoring for If you’re planning to have a large cohort of groups to obtain through standard feedback
new managers, bringing in new managers channels inside of organizations.
your organization. At the core of each of these is a focus on learning
from a merger or acquisition, or perhaps just
and development to increase retention and employee engagement. scaling rapidly, a coaching or mentoring
program can help in different ways. If you
have a strong group of leaders internally who
You want to increase
can provide mentoring to new leaders, that’s
employee engagement
a great start. If you need to provide more Increasing opportunities for employee
structure for a growing leadership team development through coaching and
across the board, coaching is likely your next mentoring directly ties into how engaged
best step. employees feel at work. According to
benchmarks from Culture Amp, learning and
development is a consistent driver of
employee engagement.
How to select Coach and mentor quality Integration

a leadership
Look for a platform that can establish the quality of its As your program scales, you should be able to
coaches and mentors using hard data. Platforms link your platform’s application with your

development
should provide you with the average Net Promoter internal data warehouse to import the
Score of their coaches and mentors, regularly survey analytics into your HRIS system. This allows
participants about their experiences, and make that

platform
you to look at ROI by integrating coaching and
data available. mentoring analytics with talent data on
employee engagement, productivity, and
turnover. In addition, platforms that support
Session scheduling single sign-on (SSO) allow your team to log in
High-quality platforms understand the importance of with their standard credentials, which creates
Many organizations choose to partner with a more seamless integration with your internal
regular, consistent sessions with both coaches and
a leadership development platform for ease mentors and have built software to simplify the systems.
of use. Creating an in-house leadership scheduling process.
coaching or mentoring program from
scratch can vary widely in cost and quality, Administration
and the process of identifying, vetting, and Rigorous assessment Your platform should provide a dedicated
aligning the right coaches and mentors is The best platforms provide a thorough, 360 customer success support team that can
time-consuming. High-quality platforms like assessment at the beginning of an engagement, partner with you to design and evolve your
opening up opportunities for feedback, and program, drive the right outcomes, and resolve
Torch reduce the cost of traditional
measuring positive change over time. any challenges that come up along the way.
coaching and mentoring, while allowing
organizations to effectively scale and
measure their programs. Customization Data privacy & security
The platform you choose should fit the competencies To ensure vigorous privacy and security,
We provide the top considerations to keep and leadership philosophy of your organization. In leadership development platforms should
in mind when selecting a leadership other words, the platform should be customizable to comply with General Data Privacy
development platform in this checklist. your needs and blend seamlessly with your existing Requirements (GDPR), pass regular
initiatives to drive growth. penetration testing, and be able to establish
third-party verification of their security
protocols.
Designing a coaching
and mentoring
program that works
The right leadership development platform is a powerful tool, but careful
planning is needed to ensure the program meets your objectives.

Here are six essential steps you'll need to take to get the most out of your
program.

1
Determine your goals
Identify the goals for your leadership
coaching and mentoring program. This, in
turn, will help you determine your
approach. For instance, if your goal is to
2
Determine your
competency models
The next step is to identify the specific
competencies or behaviors that you
want your team to develop through
3
Build a positive brand
To increase adoption of your program,
we recommend building an internal
brand that makes participation a
special benefit rather than a
reduce turnover, particularly among junior coaching and mentoring. Large requirement. Consider introducing a
team members and new managers, you organizations usually have competency process where managers nominate
may want to focus on increasing models in place, but it can be high-performing employees and
engagement. Coaching and mentoring challenging to translate them into leaders. This not only publicly
programs, which have been shown to build specific target behaviors. Leadership acknowledges the value of nominees,
confidence, are great tools for this. coaching and mentoring are great but also positions leadership coaching
opportunities to hone in on them and and mentoring as a vital step in their
On the other hand, if your goal is to have team members practice new skills development. Your program can also
increase productivity and performance, and strategies. be an aspirational goal for others in the
you might want to focus more on helping organization and motivate them to
people set specific goals and track improve their performance or get to
progress with ongoing feedback from certain levels of leadership to qualify.
colleagues.
4
Select participants
There are a few factors to take into consideration when
selecting participants for your program:

Seniority
5
Plan a pilot program
A time-limited pilot program is a cost effective way to
evaluate the impact of leadership coaching or mentoring
before rolling out the program more broadly.
6 Roll out the full-scale program
A leadership development program is most effective
when it allows you to draw valid conclusions about the
strengths, challenges, and growth trajectories of your
organization’s entire workforce. To do so, you need to
Coaching typically benefits anyone from the manager Below are a few factors to take into consideration: implement leadership coaching and mentoring
level all the way to the highest level executives. For broadly enough to affect a significant percentage of
mentoring, it’s best to target anyone from the manager to Sample size your workforce. If those individuals show significant
the senior director level. If your ultimate goal is to have 100 employees and leaders positive change, these changes may also have a
receive coaching and mentoring, a pilot of 20-25 people is a meaningful positive effect on the colleagues they
Personality traits good place to start. work most closely with.
It’s important to find participants who embody a growth
mindset, which is the belief that one can improve through Random selection For example, if a 2,000 person organization deploys
hard work. We conducted research that shows Consider randomly selecting the subset of people from the leadership coaching with 100 (5%) of its leaders, and
individuals with a growth mindset are more than twice as larger talent pool and letting them opt-in if selected. Random each leader has 5 direct reports, coaching should
engaged as those who aren’t open to moving outside selection is an important concept in pilot design because it impact 600 (30%) of its total workforce. The broad
their comfort zone. increases the likelihood that the pilot group will resemble the reach of a program of this scale can yield valuable
larger group they were selected from. insights at the individual, team, and organizational
Openness to the process levels.
Coaching and mentoring programs work best when Duration
participants can “opt in” since this is a benefit that It’s important for the pilot to be long enough for each client
requires additional time commitment. That’s why it’s to establish a strong working relationship, gain insight into
important to select participants who show evidence of strengths and challenges, set preliminary goals, and begin to
high motivation, openness, and flexibility. make reasonable progress on goals. In general, six to seven
months is a good timeframe for a pilot.

Understanding how to develop leaders inside a company is one of

the biggest challenges for every founder and CEO. Torch helps
create better leaders. Pretty much a no brainer.” - Justin Kan, Co-founder – Justin.tv and Twitch.tv
Determining
ROI of your
program
1
Model ROI
During early partnership discussions, leadership
development platforms should be able to make a
compelling, evidence-based case that their solution will
result in positive ROI. This typically involves walking you
2
Track analytics
During the pilot, you’ll want to make sure that your platform
collects the data that will ultimately be used to determine
impact. There are three categories of data your platform
should collect to rigorously measure the effects of
through an easy-to-understand ROI calculator. There are coaching and mentoring.
two halves to the ROI calculation: reducing costs and
An effective leadership development program should increasing profits. Program impact
reduce costs associated with turnover, disengagement, and The impact and success of the program should be made
burnout, while increasing profits due to expanded To argue that coaching and mentoring reduces costs, evident through various metrics like assessments, surveys,
productivity among participants and their direct reports. platforms should be able to model the current costs of skills tests, engagement, and action planning and
employee turnover, and the expected cost of disengaged execution.
However, linking the impact of a coaching or mentoring employees working at less than full potential. To argue that
program with internal expenses and revenues takes time, coaching and mentoring increases profits, platforms should Individual and team progress
data, and analysis. Since determining true ROI is a resource be able to make a research-based estimate of increased How much did participants grow as a result of coaching?
intensive process we recommend that organizations use productivity among participants and their teams. Your platform should be able to measure and report on
the following four-step process to assess the ROI of Remember that any ROI estimate during initial partnership engagement, insights, actions, and growth for individuals
leadership coaching and mentoring. discussions should be considered a general guide meant to and across teams, cohorts, programs.
help you gauge impact.
HR metrics
Platforms should be able to integrate with existing HR
programs and systems to understand its impact on key
metrics like employee engagement and satisfaction,
organizational health, and promotion and retention rates.

In addition to these measures, your platform will need the

ability to collect ongoing feedback from participant team
members. Colleague feedback helps you establish whether
participants have improved enough, based on the initial
results of their 360 assessment, for their progress to
positively impact their team. Team impact is arguably the
most important effect of leadership coaching, which makes
the effectiveness approach ideal for organizations that
want to build better leaders.
3
Merge analytics with your HRIS
Once you’ve completed the pilot, reviewed the
data, and started a full-scale coaching or
4
Measure
Turnover ROI
To measure ROI from reduced turnover, consider the
GROUP PHOTO
or office setting
mentoring program, connecting your platform
following example. Let’s assume 100 senior leaders at
analytics with your internal HRIS via application
your organization have gone through coaching, and that
programming interface (API) is the last step in
you have a control group of 100 senior leaders similar in
determining ROI. With analytics from your platform
terms of age, gender, and management level. Let’s also
alongside internal data on performance
assume that your annual turnover rate is 10%.
management, you can compare participants in
your coaching or mentoring program to a “control
By tracking both groups for one year following the end of
group” with a similar distribution of age, gender, and
coaching, you can see whether participants in the
management level. You can determine ROI by
coaching group left your organization at lower rates than
comparing coaching or mentoring participants with
managers in the control group. If six coaching
your control group in terms of turnover and
participants left the following year versus 10 managers in
productivity.
the control group, your coaching program reduced
turnover by 40% and saved your organization the cost of
recruiting and training four new leaders.

Productivity ROI
ROI related to productivity is more challenging to
measure. Increased productivity among engineering
leaders may result in higher quality code, fewer bugs,
and more features shipped, whereas more productive
marketing leaders may generate more qualified leads or
greater brand awareness.

To measure ROI in terms of productivity, identify the

most objective measures of productivity for each
individual, then compare similar individuals from the
coaching or mentoring group to those in the control
group along those measures. Research tells us that sales
managers in the coaching or mentoring group should
add more revenue than sales managers in the control
group in the year after participating in a program.
Leadership coaching and mentoring are two of the most powerful
tools you have at your disposal when it comes to developing and
retaining the top-performing people at your organization. Take the
time to select the right leadership development platform, and you’ll
see your investment pay off many times over.

To learn more about how to get started with Torch, request a demo.

Speak with Torch today