What Thirty Years of Asking the ROI Question Has Taught Me
Almost thirty years ago, I wrote my PhD on evaluating communication and behavioural change training, what people then, and still today, often call ‘soft skills training.’ My research involved interviews and surveys immediately after training, and again three and six months later. I also gathered feedback from participants’ managers, creating a robust and triangulated data set.
The findings were encouraging. We observed significant and measurable improvements in the behaviours participants were aiming to develop. What we could not demonstrate, however, was whether those behavioural changes translated into broader organisational outcomes: stronger business performance, better talent retention, reduced conflict, or a healthier workplace culture.
Three decades later, despite the growth of the coaching and leadership-development industry, that fundamental challenge remains. Leaders and CFOs continue to ask the same question before approving a coaching budget: Does this actually work?
Part of the difficulty lies in the language we use. ‘Soft skills’ is a misleading term. Capabilities such as active listening, trust-building, and conflict management are not optional traits. They are hard skills that can be learned, practised, refined, and measured over time.
A few years ago, I was asked to work with the CEO and CFO of a listed company who had effectively stopped communicating. I coached each leader individually before bringing them together in structured conversations. Over time, trust and communication slowly re-emerged, and eventually they continued meeting productively without my involvement.
They did not become friends, nor did they need to. What mattered was that they rebuilt a functional working relationship grounded in a shared commitment to the organisation’s success. Often, that is enough.
The obvious question is what would have happened without the intervention. Most likely, the CFO would have left or been pushed out. Replacing a senior executive is expensive, disruptive, and time consuming. Yet the tension was never purely personal. At its heart, it was systemic, arising from the different accountabilities and pressures built into the two roles.
This is where the value of coaching often resides: in the resignation that never happens, the executive search that never begins, and the organisational disruption that never materialises. The most significant outcomes are frequently the fires that never start.
I no longer believe I will ever fully answer the question that originally motivated my PhD. But I have stopped seeing that as a failure of measurement. Some of the most important things leaders do are difficult to quantify, yet their impact can be profound. We should be honest about the distinction between proof and evidence. In leadership development and coaching, evidence is often the strongest form of certainty we can reasonably expect.
