The CFO had one slide open and one question ready. “We spent real money on coaching the leadership team last year. What did we actually get? What was the ROI of team coaching?”
Dana, the Chief People Officer, had seen this moment coming for weeks. She believed the coaching had worked. She could feel it in the room when the leadership team met. Fewer side conversations. Less relitigating of decisions. A kind of steadiness that hadn’t been there before.
But “I can feel it” doesn’t survive a budget review. And the number she’d planned to lean on, the one every coaching brochure repeats, fell apart the moment the CFO asked where it came from.
The Number Everyone Quotes for ROI
Here’s the truth most people in my field don’t say out loud. The most famous figure in coaching … that it returns about seven times its cost, comes most recently from a 2009 global survey of coaching clients conducted for the International Coach Federation by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Data was self-reported by executives who participated. There was no control group. The median was calculated only from organizations that could put a number on their return. And it measured individual coaching, not teams.
That doesn’t make the study worthless. It makes it the wrong tool for the job. When you bring a borrowed number about individual executives into a conversation about your leadership team, you’re handing a skeptical CFO an easy reason to dismiss everything else you say.
You deserve better evidence than that. So does your CFO.
What the Stronger Evidence Says About the ROI of Team Coaching
The good news is that stronger evidence does exist. In 2023, researchers Erik de Haan and Viktor Nilsson published a meta-analysis in Academy of Management Learning & Education that included only randomized controlled trials, the gold standard for research. Across 37 trials, they found that workplace coaching had a moderate and meaningful positive effect on leadership and personal outcomes. They also found that the effects looked larger when people rated themselves than when others observed them.
Coaching works, and self-reports probably flatter it a little.
Team coaching research is younger still. A 2024 randomized trial by Jonathan Passmore, David Tee, and Richard Gold, published in the Journal of Work-Applied Management, described its own results as the first evidence from a randomized trial that team coaching works as a workplace intervention. Coached teams in that study made greater gains in cohesion and psychological safety than teams who received facilitation alone. It was a small study, with 51 participants. It’s a beginning, not a verdict.
Honesty about what we know is what makes the rest of the case credible.
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You’re Measuring the ROI of Team Coaching Too Soon
Here’s what I’ve seen, sitting with various teams through the full arc of this work. The problem usually isn’t that coaches and team leaders measure the wrong things. It’s that they measure them too soon.
Coach a complex system like a team doesn’t fix one person’s habits. It changes how the whole team thinks, decides, and serves the people who depend on it. That kind of change moves in stages. It shows up first in the room, in how conversations go and how quickly decisions land. It shows up later (maybe much later) in the numbers everyone, like your CFO, cares about most: retention and revenue.
So, when a CEO asks for bottom line proof on the last day of an engagement, you most likely won’t have it. The team hasn’t failed. The request for proof, especially monetary proof, has simply arrived early.
Think about planting an orchard and demanding fruit at the end of the first season. You’d most likely measure root depth and new growth, not harvest.
▶ Why Reframing Your Team as a System is a Game Changer
What to Measure and When
If you want evidence of the value of coaching your CFO will respect, build it yourself. Baseline these before the engagement starts, then measure again at the end:
- Team effectiveness scores. A short survey of how the team rates its own clarity, trust, and accountability ideally paired with ratings from team stakeholders outside the team.
- Decision speed. How long does it take to move from first discussion to a decision that sticks?
- Meeting time, with quality held steady. Are you spending fewer hours in meetings without worse outcomes?
- Cross functional delivery speed. How long do shared initiatives take from kickoff to completion?
- Stakeholder feedback. What do the people your team serves, inside and outside the organization, say about working with your team?
Then keep going. Retention is one of the most valuable outcomes of this work, and it rarely shows up by the final session. Compare turnover in the coached team with the company average at six and twelve months. That’s usually where the quiet wins surface.
Notice what this does. It focuses on specific, relevant lead measures that the team controls rather than general lag measures that may not show up until many months or even years later especially in a complex adaptive system like an organization.
It trades one borrowed statistic for a body of evidence that’s yours.
The Cost of Waiting to Engage a Team Coach
There’s one more number worth knowing. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025, down from 31% in 2022. Compare that statistic to organizations Gallup identified as using best practices where 79% of managers were engaged.
That gap isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice about where leaders put their attention.
Every quarter, there’s a cost to a leadership team that operates below what it’s capable of, even if nobody puts it on a slide. Slow decisions. Duplicated work. Good people quietly updating their résumés.
So, here’s my invitation. Before you decide whether team coaching is worth it, get curious about what your current patterns are already costing you. Pick two of the metrics in the section above. Baseline them this month. Then ask yourself the question the imaginary CFO asked the CHRO, with real answers in hand.
The data you need isn’t in a brochure. It’s within your own team.
Next step: If you’d like a thinking partner as you build that baseline, I’d welcome a 30-minute conversation. Let’s chat.