Stop Funding Coaching You Can't Prove Works

Coaching is having a moment — the market has grown more than 60% since 2019, and a third of Fortune 500 companies are now paying for executive coaching. But when most leaders are asked whether their coaching program is actually working, the confidence disappears fast. In this episode, Vanessa Milara Alzate sits down with Jordan Rawlinson, Learning and Performance Manager at Kirkpatrick Partners and author of the coaching chapter in Building a Culture of Evaluation: The New Kirkpatrick Model for Performance and Innovation, to make the case that coaching is measurable — it just requires a different lens than training. Jordan explains why the coach-coachee relationship, known as the working alliance, predicts coaching success more than any technique or model. They dig into why Level 1 Reaction, usually treated as the least important level in training, may be the most foundational level in coaching. And they talk candidly about why coaching should never be mandatory, what has to be true in a culture before coaching can take root, and how to move coaching from a nice-to-have perk to a funded, evaluated strategy. Takeaways: what the working alliance is and why it predicts outcomes, how to build measurement into a self-directed process, why voluntold coaching backfires, and where to start if you want to evaluate your own coaching program. Learn more and get the book at kirkpatrickpartners.com   Enterprise Performance Intelligence (EPI) Maturity Assessment  Think your organization is measuring impact? Most aren't. The EPI Maturity Assessment helps you quickly identify where you stand—and what's needed to better connect learning to performance and results. 👉 Take the assessment and get clarity on your next step. Building a Culture of Evaluation Order the book behind the Culture of Evaluation framework and updated Kirkpatrick Model. The book comes with a Companion Guide to help support you on the journey. 👉 Order the book now Kirkpatrick Learning and Performance Center of Excellence Certification builds capability. Accreditation builds systems. The Kirkpatrick Certified Organization accreditation recognizes organizations that have embedded the Kirkpatrick Four Levels® into how they actually operate — through governance, SOPs, feedback loops, and cross-functional accountability. If your evaluation capability would disappear when a key person leaves, this is the credential designed to fix that. Founding Organization status is now open — first year of annual maintenance waived for inaugural cohort members. 👉 Learn more and apply Not ready to apply yet because you need to build the systems? Grab the SOPs. We're building a library of Kirkpatrick-standard SOPs — governance frameworks, evaluation procedures for all four levels, planning templates, and implementation guides — so you can build your infrastructure before you apply. 👉 Learn more <h3 data-section-