I spent 20 years in public accounting. Different firms, different sizes, different seats, but always leading teams and always leading people.
Then I came to Spiirall as a coach and eventually led the coaching service line, and I have spent the years since doing the thing I most wanted to do in all those earlier roles but never had enough time for.
I recently got to spend 45 minutes with a group of talent development and firm leaders walking through the framework we use, and I want to put the core of it here for the people who could not make it. Almost everything below has been shaped by the professionals we coach and by the internal coaches in our Spiirall Talent Advisor Network, who are inside firms doing this same work every day.
If you work in talent development, you already know this one. We hire great people. Maybe not enough of them, but the ones we get are talented. They gain experience, and they have the potential to do great things.
And then we need leaders who are ready for more. We need more supervisors and more managers. We need succession, because retiring partners are handing off client loads that have to go somewhere. The challenge is how you get someone from potential to what I would call leadership readiness, where they are equipped, ready, and willing to take on what the firm needs from them.
That gap does not close by accident. I am convinced coaching is one of the biggest accelerators available for closing it, and the reason is what it builds: confidence, capabilities, and capacity, all at once, all pointed at readiness.
We are in CPA firms. We have CPE, and honestly, we love it. It means we get to do a lot of training, which is genuinely wonderful.
But learning and coaching are not the same thing, and training does not complete the cycle we actually need. Training increases knowledge. Sometimes it is a series, but usually it is a one-time event, and once it is over, it is on that individual to decide whether anything happens next. There is not always a leader holding them accountable to apply it. That is why I still hear from firms with genuinely robust training programs that they have a behavior change problem.
Coaching is where I think that gap gets filled. For us it is consistent, once a month, and consistency is what makes accountability possible. It can absolutely be paired with a training. It also works on skills that need building whether or not a course exists, like managing your time, managing your capacity, or getting into an advisory mindset. We have trainings on all of those. Coaching is where a specific person actually works through them.
With my advisees, every session ends with an action item. The next month I ask about it. What did you do, what didn't you do, why, how did it go, and what do you want to try differently. Those are several additional layers that a training simply does not have.
Every journey we run follows the same five stages. The focus varies, and it might be communication or delegation or executive presence or business development, but the shape does not change. Let me use business development as the example.
Potential. This is always where we begin. We believe the person in front of us has what they need to become wildly successful. Maybe this is a future partner. They are strong technically, and now business development matters, and they want more confidence initiating client conversations or asking for opportunities. We coach from staff to partner, so this could be almost anyone.
Development. This is where we build capability. It is not a training. It is a personalized one-on-one space to build skills and explore the mindsets underneath them. What questions do we need to ask, and how do we ask better ones so that trust and relationships develop.
Application. Knowledge on its own is not enough. So the skill has to leave the room. For a business development journey, this month's action item might be scheduling a coffee with a prospect or a client, or asking a partner for an introduction, or simply blocking the time. It has to be small enough to actually happen.
Accountability. Next month, I ask. I want to be very clear that this is not judgment and it is not "why didn't you do this." It is reflection. What worked, what didn't, and if it didn't happen, how do we make sure you have the time. This piece is one of the key success factors in coaching, and it is completely absent from a training.
Performance. Over time, things change. For some people it is the very next month, and they are blocking their calendar and having the conversations. For others it takes longer. What matters is that the change becomes observable to their supervisor and their peers, and that it becomes consistent. That consistency is leadership readiness.
I love structure, so here is ours.
We align journeys to 12 months. Coaching does not end at 12 months, but the timeline gives us bookends. Every six months we meet with the advisee's supervisor. At 12 months we celebrate the progress, validate the challenges that got overcome, and look ahead. If someone spent a year on business development, we ask what was gained and what the next 12 months should be, whether that is a 2.0 version or something different because their role changed.
Inside the sessions, a few things matter to us:
I will be honest, I love words far more than I love stats. But I know numbers matter, especially in this profession, and last year we finally got real data.
We give every advisee an onboarding questionnaire that includes four benchmarking questions: whether they have a clear career vision for the next 12 to 24 months, whether they know what tools are available and how to use them, how engaged they feel in their work, and how confident they are in their ability to grow and accomplish their goals within their firm. Last year we asked the same four questions of people who had been in coaching for one, two, or three years.
All four moved. Coaching is obviously not the only thing that happened in those years, but the difference between arriving and being a few years in is substantial, and the engagement result in particular is worth sitting with given everything Gallup keeps telling us about the workforce. Ninety-eight percent of participants said the program had a positive impact on them.
We survey supervisors too, and I would encourage you to do the same in any program you build. Advisee satisfaction is essential, but I do not want this to be something the advisee feels good about while their supervisor sees nothing change. The supervisor is a key part of our program, which is why we are in contact with them and meet with them and the advisee twice a year.
This is the point I most want you to take with you, and it has nothing to do with program design.
In accounting, we use "coaching" to mean a lot of different things. Some firms mean mentoring. Some mean supervising. Everything I wrote above is through the lens of a professional coach, someone whose actual job is to show up and coach.
Managers, supervisors, and mentors can absolutely provide coaching. I am not saying otherwise. But if I am a supervisor and coaching is part of my responsibility, I am doing it some small percentage of the time, and the rest of the time I am delivering client work and overseeing teams. Those are different conversations with different results.
Which brings me to one of my biggest aggravations, and it is really just the industry: we expect a lot out of everybody without always checking whether it is realistic. If you are adding coaching to your firm, please make sure the expectations line up with the workload, the capacity, and the skills of whoever you are asking to do it. Do not expect professional coach outcomes from a senior manager who has a full-time job doing something else.
You cannot do everything at once. Here is what I would do.
Start at the biggest transition. For a lot of firms it is the move from doer to supervisor, that new manager who is suddenly in charge of things and still has to hit her own billable hours. Sometimes it is emerging partners. Wherever the friction is worst, that is where a little more support changes the most.
Define success, and define it narrowly. No program solves all the problems. Decide what you are calling success in year one and year two. Maybe it is just equipping people. Maybe it is establishing what coaching even means at your firm. Then communicate it, because participants, supervisors, and partners all need to be aligned on it or everybody gets confused.
Get clear on roles. Use an internal program, use managers and leaders, use someone external. Any of those can work. Just be explicit about what it is meant to do and make sure the people involved have the capacity to do it.
Pilot with 5 to 10 people. High-potential professionals in a transition. Do not start with 100. Pick one or two journey types and make sure they are doable.
Consider group coaching as an addition. It works well when the group has something in common, like a leadership readiness cohort or a class of newly promoted seniors.
Measure something. Your stakeholders are going to want numbers. Be intentional about what you surface, and accept that it is iterative. Even a satisfaction survey tells you something about impact.
And then there is coaching culture, which you can read plenty of HBR articles about. The buy-in and the shared understanding matter more than the mechanics.
When you talk about skill building in coaching, is the coach sharing best practices, or is it completely client-driven?
Traditional pure coaching, the kind you learn in a certification program, is very client-driven. You show up, you talk about what you want to talk about. Structured coaching journeys are closer to guided career and performance coaching.
There is still room in every session to ask what is most important today. If someone just walked out of a conflict, that is what we are working on, and conflict management is itself a skill, so the cycle still applies. But the journey gives it direction. Communication shows up on almost every journey we run, and that is where the intentional skill building comes in, through pre-reads and specific questions. For a lot of my folks it is about becoming proactive. You are a senior now, and your project team and your partners and your peers need proactive communication from you, not you handling things reactively as they hit your desk. That is leadership readiness too.
I have an HR background but have never coached. Where should I start?
Get a coach. That is my number one recommendation, because once you have experienced it you actually understand what it is. There are podcasts, and the International Coaching Federation, which is where I am accredited along with many of our coaches, has a plethora of material on what coaching is, how to execute it, and what it is not. If you are researching, start there.
But really, engage a coach, even for six or twelve months. Experiencing what coaching can do for you personally, or for your leaders, is life changing.
All of this might look different at your firm or in your program. Just know that it is possible.
Watch the full session for the journey map and the full set of journey types.
If you are thinking through what coaching could look like at your firm, I would genuinely like to hear about it. Reach me at amcclain@lcvista.com or on LinkedIn, or talk to our team about Spiirall's coaching and managed services.