Reflections on Coaching Project

Coaching Project

As part of the Digital Education Leadership Program, I have had the opportunity to be involved in a Coaching Project within an education business environment. I worked with a Coaching Partner to develop a Coaching Plan and collaborated on a strategy to implement the plan as well as improve it.

Methodology

The coaching partner I collaborated with was a person in a Marketing role within an education business. The main coaching goal was to improve the growth marketing performance for the school as well as improve communication and collaboration skills with other team members. Besides that, I also focused on helping my coaching partner understand the product being marketed and to understand the target audience more. I also helped her analyze the current marketing performance and guide her in putting together a marketing automation plan for lead generation. Feedback was given to my coaching partner via face-to-face meetings on a weekly basis with additional ad-hoc feedback in digital form throughout the week.

ISTE Standard for Coaches

The ISTE Standards addressed for this Coaching Project corresponds to ISTE Coaching Standard 1 on Change Agent.

Coaches inspire educators and leaders to use technology to create equitable and ongoing access to high-quality learning. Coaches:

  1. Create a shared vision and culture for using technology to learn and accelerate transformation through the coaching process. 
  2. Facilitate equitable use of digital learning tools and content that meet the needs of each learner. 
  3. Cultivate a supportive coaching culture that encourages educators and leaders to achieve a shared vision and individual goals. 
  4. Recognize educators across the organization who use technology effectively to enable high-impact teaching and learning. 
  5. Connect leaders, educators, instructional support, technical support, domain experts and solution providers to maximize the potential of technology for learning. 

The Coaching Plan

In developing the initial coaching plan, I started out by establishing what the school’s academic focus and goals were with the school’s administrator. The school has a very clear mission to help students foster academic excellence today while preparing them for tomorrow’s success in a 21st-century society. To support this mission, the school has launched an English immersion program that incorporates 21st-century skills into the curriculum while preparing children to be global citizens.

Also addressed in the coaching plan were the coach’s roles and responsibilities, the resources needed, method of communication, and ways of measuring success. All these points were important in helping me, my coaching partner, as well as the administrator, think through how we might work together.

Next, we established the goal statement for this coaching project using the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) with indicators to help us know if we were making progress. We also established how we might work to improve learning achievement across different areas including content skills, pedagogy skills, integrating higher-order skills like critical thinking, problem-solving or collaboration, into the project.

Within this coaching plan, we also thought about how we might leverage technology to enhance the whole learning process and to make for smoother team collaboration.

Finally, we set a timeline for reaching the goals set by first breaking things down into key milestones and setting deadlines for each milestone. It will be easier for us to measure progress and ensure that we were on track by breaking down large goals into smaller key milestones.

The Coaching Meeting

An initial meeting was set up with my coaching partner to set out goals for the coaching program based on the coaching plan above. I made full use of all the key learnings on coaching from this course. The biggest challenge I faced in this initial meeting is in switching from my role of Manager to Coach because my coaching partner was also my direct report at work and I was responsible for my partner’s work performance appraisal.

Communication Skills

In the beginning, I did sense some apprehension on the part of my coaching partner as there can be some stigma attached to “coaching” – i.e. one is in need of coaching due to non-performance. I tried to reset the tone and stressed that the objective of the coaching session was really for personal development in order to scale higher heights.

We spent some time discussing where she saw herself in the company and I reinforced the fact that I see her on the path toward management and that when she is leading a bigger team in the future, the skills we cover during the coaching program will help her operate at a higher level. She seemed to come around and felt more relaxed after that. However, I recognized that we were still early on in the journey towards building trust.

Meeting Norms

Meeting norms were set out to guide our interactions:

  • Communication tools – Outlook calendar was chosen as the main tool for scheduling meetings. For ad-hoc communication, we used Microsoft Teams. 
  • Meeting frequency – A meeting was set for an hour once a week and to stick to scheduled meeting times. However, during the week, I agreed to also meet for quick check-ins if my coaching partner just needed some guidance on work-in-progress.
  • Expectations – It was agreed that campaign drafts that were part of the coaching plan will be sent to me for review prior to our weekly meetings. That way, I can review them before the meeting so I can provide more organized feedback during the scheduled coaching meetings. Coaching progress and the campaign drafts were tracked in order to measure coaching effectiveness. 

Building Trust

Considering my role at work as my coaching partner’s direct manager, I recognized that it will be largely on me to drive efforts to build and earn trust. Recognizing my own role in this coaching relationship is also key to how I build trust.

Apart from being the facilitator planning and leading the meetings, I also participated actively by collaborating to formulate, implement, and evaluate strategies alongside my coaching partner. It was important to establish my role as her collaborator instead of her manager in this coaching relationship. This helped to remove any fear of failure being pinned solely on my coaching partner. 

I also found that the research I had done for Module 2 really helped me find ways to build and strengthen trust with my coaching partner.  What I found most useful was that if the coachee can be made to see that the change does not impact the coachee’s core identity, the barriers and resistance to change are lowered. The implication for me as a coach was to affirm her more and coach for a more expansive sense of self. 

Co-Planning The Project

After the initial coaching meeting, we began working on co-planning a project to develop a product offer and craft a digital marketing campaign to promote the new product. The final campaign will consist of a digital video ad with promotional text along with the target audience definition.

Problem-Based Task

We started out by analyzing past digital campaigns to find out where we stood in terms of campaign performance. We found that the number of ad impressions and ad engagements seemed to be high, but the actual lead conversion rate had room for improvement. This is an indicator that audience targeting might be improved further for us to reach the right audience for our service offerings. To improve targeting, we made use of the audience exclusion feature to exclude non-targets from our list. We also narrowed the radius of our location targeting to reach only those who live close to our campus.

Engaging Task

We also reviewed the performance of our video ads and found that audience attention was on a declining curve against time with most of the attention lost after the first 4 seconds. The implication of this finding is that the call-to-action placed at the last video frame received the least attention. The quickest fix for us was to rewrite the ad copy and reorganize the frames so that the most important call to action appeared upfront and stayed constant throughout the 15-second ad. This will give the audience a higher chance of responding to our call-to-action.

Use of Technology to Enable and Accelerate Learning

As we reviewed the current workflow, we found that reviews and waiting for feedback by email took up quite a lot of time especially when different teams’ availability differed in a fast-paced work environment. To cut down on inefficiencies and waiting times, we made use of collaborative tools like Google Slides and Google Sheets so that different teams can work collaboratively and provide input in real-time. We also used Canva to author video clips, prepare video ads, and templates which helped cut down on ad development time.

Project Improvement

After implementing the plan, we allowed the ad to run and then analyzed the campaign’s performance to identify key areas for improvement. In particular, we looked into the reach, results, ad spend, ad engagement, results per day, and cost per result. Comparisons were made against previous campaigns to benchmark the current campaign’s performance.

Iteration 1

In our first campaign iteration, we saw a very significant improvement in cost per result which was 57% lower than the old campaign. The lower the cost per result, the better it is for us as it meant spending less to achieve a result. We also saw an increase of 3.8x in results per day.

Encouraged by this significant improvement, we spoke to the front-line team who manages customer inquiries to gauge the quality of the leads generated. We found that a large proportion of the leads ended up losing interest after finding out that the location of our campus was too far for them to commute.

With the findings after speaking to the front-line team, we refined our geographical targeting further by narrowing the target radius from our campus. Even though this would mean our target base would be smaller, we were keen to see if this move will help improve the quality of leads, not just quantity.

Iteration 2

The second campaign iteration has just rolled out for less than 3 days and we were very surprised by the results. Cost per result was 18% higher than Iteration 1 but this was still 51% lower than the old campaign. The results per day doubled from Iteration 1 and were 7.6x more than the old campaign. Checks with front-line staff also revealed an improvement in the quality of leads with the customers more willing to come for trial classes as the location was convenient for them.

Reflections on Coaching Project

At the beginning of this coaching project, I had my apprehensions as my coaching partner was also my direct report. All the tools and key learnings from this course really helped me set the stage for a better coaching relationship. In particular, I have found 3 things that were most important – communication, collaboration, and building trust.

Communication

I learned that being a good communicator in a regular work environment does not automatically make me a good coach. There was a whole new “language” in coaching that I needed to learn. What worked well for me was in exercising active listening skills and questioning skills while keeping responses non-judgmental. Another coaching tool I found most helpful was paraphrasing. I discovered that paraphrasing helps me to clarify my understanding of responses from my coaching partner.

Collaboration

Another aspect that really helped with the coaching relationship was the collaborative aspect of this project. By working on the project together, it felt less like I was evaluating and judging my coaching partner (a.k.a. my direct report) but rather both of us working together to achieve a shared goal.

Building Trust

Building trust especially in the workplace takes time and intentional effort. I find that it is important to be slow in judging failures but to be quick in celebrating wins, no matter how small. Celebrating small improvements together helps build trust and gives fuel to greater success down the road.

1 thought on “Reflections on Coaching Project

  1. LES FOLTOS says:

    What a great record of the journey the two of you took together. Coaching a direct report is an incredible challenge. Yet it is one more and more businesses are asking managers to take on. I am sure there are many in the business community that would benefit from you explaining in more detail what made you successeful. Certainly this has to be one key, “be slow in judging failures but to be quick in celebrating wins, no matter how small.” What are some others?

    Reply

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