Here's an idea worth playing with

Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of here's an idea worth playing with with me, Rob Lambert. Now these are short, sharp riffs from the sort of edges of creativity, communication, and learning, all, you know, around business. And today, we're talking about building internal coaching or consulting teams. Now, you usually find these in pretty big organizations where you have groups of specialists who are particularly good at solving, you know, business problems or maybe this is releasing business agility or maybe some management coaching. Now, these central teams, they can either be indispensable or they can be a massive cost.

And today, I'm gonna share some very, very short examples of how you could build an internal coaching and consulting team that is indispensable, that people rave about. Idea number one is that you probably need to get clear about the difference between coaching and consulting. Now, I've seen a lot of these internal teams really conflate these two ideas together. Now, the first one, let's maybe just go through what I think coaching and consulting are. Now, of course, there are many different ideas around this.

But coaching for me is about nurturing growth and skills and behaviors and leadership. This is about working with individuals and helping them to sort of grow those skills, the behaviors and the leadership that they need to solve the problems that they face and, you know, move the business forward. Consulting, on the other hand, for me, is about providing usually tactical solutions, you know, concrete examples, frameworks, various different things that you could almost sort of bring in and just just do. You know, they're using you for your expertise. They're not necessarily after some of the coaching aspects, but they are after solving some of those business issues.

Now, in my experience, the best teams are the ones that have a combination of these two things. But actually, what I see often is the business needs consulting. It wants answers to problems, but the internal teams are set up more around coaching. So there's this sort of misalignment and sort of disconnection between what the people internal in the business expect from this team and what that team are willing to deliver. Now for me, it's always a blend of the two.

I don't think inseparable. I think to do some good consulting, you have to do good coaching. And I think as part of coaching, there'll be elements where you can throw in a little bit of consultancy as well. But get clear about it. Get specific.

If it is purely coaching, then be sure that your customers and clients understand that it is coaching they are getting. So idea number two is to remember that you are a cost, your team, you're internal to the organization, therefore, you are a cost. Positive vibes, nice feedback, these are all good things to get from internal stakeholders, but you are a cost. So you need to bear this in mind. You need to somehow work out how you can connect yourself to the value that is generated by the business.

Now that value, when we talk about it in financial terms, is always external to the organization. We get value as an organization when people buy our products and services. You need to work out how what it is that you're doing is connected to the external value. You might be helping the teams get faster at delivery. You might be generating higher quality, which means that maybe we can charge a bit more for the service.

You might be doing cost reduction. You could be doing revenue growth. But what you're not doing is a bit of wishy washy stuff to try and help them get better with no connection to value. This is one of the biggest challenges that the internals team face, is because when the accountancies and the finance people are sat looking at costs, there's a line item for your team, and it's a cost. And it's your job to try and tie that cost, that investment, into external value.

So wherever possible, connect your work to the external business outcomes. That mindset alone will keep your service lean, it'll keep it strategically focused, and hopefully defensible when budgets are tight. Idea number three is to define your purpose. Purpose guides everything. If you've listened to this podcast long enough, you'll know that I talk a lot about purpose.

So what problems in the organization do you and your team solve? What opportunities do you create? What outcomes define success for your work? It's not uncommon for these internal teams to suddenly be the masters of everything and start taking on work and activity, sometimes because it's the only thing going and sometimes because you have this sort of human tendency to wanna try and help with everything. But you must get clear on your purpose because as soon as you stop delivering value to the organization, you're gonna face some difficult questions.

So it pays to define your purpose upfront. What is it you do when people come knocking on your door for your services? What is it that they are gonna get? And how is that gonna make their lives better, quicker, smoother, faster, or additional value? Now this also helps because you can say no to low value work, work that you know is just cost.

There's no tangible connection to value or work that sounds good and sounds plausible and it might be nice to do, but isn't strategically aligned to what it is that you exist for, your purpose. What is the purpose of your team? Idea number four is to align products, services, and abilities together. Usually when people are pulling on these internal consultancy or coaching services, there's some problems that people have, and they go to these teams to try and help them solve them. So it makes sense then as a team to sort of package up your abilities into easily communicatable, easily digestible, and obviously valuable packages for the organization.

It could be that you do a value stream analysis of going from idea to value, and you work out how to shrink that time down. That's a valuable package. Now in there, there's gonna be coaching. There might be workshops. There might be, you know, leadership one on ones.

There could be all sorts of stuff bundled in that. But people aren't buying those individual things, they're buying the outcome. Now, the other thing to bear in mind here is not to offer things that you don't have the ability to actually deliver, and I see this so much. I see internal teams offering all sorts of results and promises and packages of work that they don't have the ability within the team to actually deliver. Or they have one person out of a 100 people in this team that can do that, and they pretend or claim or misguide themselves that that is for somehow a capability that they can offer to the organization.

It really helps if you get clear about the difference between capability and ability. Ability is what your team can do now, and capability is what your team is capable of doing with some training and some coaching and some growth. So I think one of the things you should do as a leader or manager if you're organizing those teams is to very quickly work out who has the ability, who is competent right now in doing the things that you are offering, aligned to your purpose, who, with some help and support, has the capability they are able to become capable, and then put in place all the coaching and training to share that knowledge. In other words, never promise what you can't deliver today because building capability and ability takes time. Idea number five is all about demand management.

Demand is usually good, but only if it aligns to your purpose and, of course, your abilities as well. So qualifying that request and qualifying all the incoming demand is really, really important, and I don't see a lot of teams doing this. Here's some basic questions to ask. Is it aligned to our purpose? Is it high value?

Can we tangibly connect what it is that we're gonna do to some valuable outcome for the organization? Can we measure this? In other words, can we, in some respects, justify our existence by taking on this work and actually having something tangible to show for it. Is the team actually capable of delivering it? You'd be amazed at how much work comes into some of these teams, where the team just aren't able to deliver on it.

They enter into it, everything goes wrong, and this really does reflect badly on you as your coaching team and your consulting team. So be sure that the demand is high value, be sure that it aligns to your purpose, and be sure that you are actually capable of delivering it. So idea number six is all about generating this demand. You know, these internal services still need marketing. This is a very common mistake.

It's sort of almost, if we build this internal team, then people will come to us. That's not always the case. There's an education period. There's an awareness period. There's a marketing period where you have to almost sell these internal services and the value that you deliver.

Now, I always recommend these in a few different stages. The first one, we've already sort of mentioned it, is awareness. This is about sharing articles, guides, frameworks, best practices, testimonials, anything that raises the awareness about you and your internal team. Now when we think about the size of some of these companies, they could be thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, one hundred thousand sized organizations. How are you going to get awareness out?

So think about the internal communication channels, think about going to town halls or other people's meetings, you know, think about the networking effect you can have in an organization of that size. Now, this is why it's important to define the purpose and the packages and the offers that you do, because then you can arm people with that information so that you don't oversell, that you don't undersell, and that when you do have those opportunities to raise awareness about your service, it's done truthfully, honestly, with energy and with intention. So after awareness, I always talk about free gifts for friends. Now these are sort of workshops or mini support sessions or assessments maybe if you're doing some sort of maturity. These are kind of free things that people don't have to sort of take on a long term engagement with you.

And when we think about this, this is a classic marketing funnel. We're raising awareness, we're pulling people into the funnel, and then we move on to what I call short term engagements. Now these are where you've shown some value and somebody wants you for maybe four to eight weeks. It's maybe not long enough for you to do your consultancy or coaching, maybe it is. Obviously, that's dependent on you and your context.

But it's four to eight weeks worth of work where you can help them, you can show some tangible results, you can improve the ways of working or the business or delivery. Now these are short term engagements, you've always got an exit strategy, you should have that for everything by the way, and you're hoping to demonstrate some value, and that may or may not lead into a longer term engagement, but it is good for the business because there's some outcomes, there's something beneficial, and you've raised more awareness about you, your team, and your service. And then we move into long term engagement. So these are sort of six to twelve months. Now I think these are the sweet spot.

They're long enough to make some significant change in the organization, but they're not too long where you lose people into the organization, never get them back. I always aim for about six months. Always have an exit strategy in case things aren't going to plan. And these are your long term engagements. These are the ones where you can really drive that connection to business value.

You can get in there, you can make the changes, you can help the organization, and you can improve everything. But the other pieces are the funnel. They're raising awareness. They're pulling people in. They're giving them tasters of the kind of stuff that you can do, and you're giving value.

And then hopefully, these turn into long term engagements. Now what I usually see is these internal teams starting this kind of marketing way too late in the journey when costs being analyzed, when questions are being asked about why you exist as a function. When it gets harder to sort of almost justify the value that you bring to the business, that's when people start thinking about driving the marketing. But you should do this from day one. Raise awareness, free gifts for friends, short term engagements, long term engagements.

So idea number seven is all about delivery and review. So this is really about delivering with discipline. So the first thing is always have a good coaching or consulting agreement upfront. Define the goals, define the roles, define the outcomes, define the measures. Or how are you gonna measure success?

How do you connect to the external value? Then it makes sense to have regular reviews. This might be with the leader of the area that you're working with. It could be with the key stakeholder you're working with. I always aim for these to be four to six weeks.

It's a sort of two sided thing. Know? Are they getting what they expect from your internal coaching or consulting service? But also, are you getting what you expect? Are you getting access to people?

Are you getting the freedom to do some of the stuff that you agreed upfront would be good for the business? Always make sure you've got an exit strategy. So if things aren't going quite well for either party, you have a way of extracting without it becoming a political nightmare. Then I always recommend that you close these engagements out with some sort of follow-up or road map for next steps, you know, some sort of analysis, something that gives both people the evidence that it was good work, things went to plan or didn't, whatever. They don't always go to plan.

This is kind of like a little exit review, something to maybe hold as a testimonial, but also for people to share across the organization. Idea number eight is continuous improvement. You should always be asking yourself, the people in your consultancy or coaching team, the clients and stakeholders that you're working with, how can we get better? How can we better service your needs? How can we improve the service delivery?

What can we do to grow as individuals? And also, how can we grow our abilities? You know, you might find as the business morphs, there's a need for something that you don't quite have the expertise in. So how can we grow that? Do we buy that in?

Do we do training? Do we do coaching? Let's hope we're not just making stuff up and selling it because we've covered that that's a pretty bad thing to do. But also at this point, we wanna be thinking about how can we generate more value than we do cost. Remember, you're an internal organization, internal function, you are a cost to the business.

And that cost should be offset with the value that you deliver. So always be thinking about how you can connect those two things together. Now some closing thoughts. Internal coaching and consulting teams can be real game changers for an organization, but only if they're purposeful, they're disciplined, and they're value orientated. So remember, be clear on whether it's coaching and consulting or both.

Define the purpose and the offerings that you have. Align the demand coming into the value rather than just taking anything that pops into the funnel. Build your ability responsibly, so don't try and offer something that you can't actually deliver. And then raise awareness and market internally. Review that rigorously and keep filling that demand hopper with high value work.

If you do this, you'll be transforming what is essentially an internal cost team into something that drives value in the organization, is indispensable, and literally has people saying how awesome you are and how good you are and how much you've helped them grow the business, develop skills, and add more value to the organization. And with that, I shall speak to you in the next episode. You take care of yourselves. Bye bye.