Internal vs. External: Training, Coaching and Development Programs

Internal vs. External: Training, Coaching and Development Programs

Many companies wrestle with choices around whether they will be better off using internal resources for training, coaching and development programs versus using external consultants. Based on our team’s 50 years of experience in Performance Coaching and Leadership Development both as consultants and as operations executives who have had to decide when to use consultants, we have found distinct trends and key factors which influence the decision making process. To explore this topic it is helpful to distinguish between 3 different areas where the choice of using internal or external resources may be appropriate.

1. Front line employee training
2. Management Coaching which is targeting specific business outcomes
3. Process improvement

1. Front line employee training, which typically focuses on bringing new employees up to speed on the organizations processes, specific job requirements, company culture and brand is an area which many companies seek to build internal capacity to support. The advantages of internal capacity to deliver in this area include:

Stable companies with natural attrition will have an ongoing and permanent need to training up new employees entering the workforce, therefore training resources are needed on a permanent basis.

Having internal resources available to develop training materials and deliver training to new employees prior to handing them over to the operations groups allows both the training team and the operating groups to maintain their own clear accountabilities.

The content of the training material is retained within the organization’s knowledge base which supports proprietary process and brand integrity.

2. Companies may seek to improve performance by undertaking initiatives that involve coaching of management level employees to target specific business outcomes. These coaching programs differ from leadership training. Leadership training involves teaching participants about topics such as leadership or management. In our experience, we see that the company’s size tends to influence the decision about whether to use external training resources or to build internal capacity for management training, with bigger companies tending to go in-house.

Conversely, coaching takes place after the training is complete and aims to assist in the conversion of theory into practice. Successful performance improvement coaching requires that the coach is able to establish a coaching relationship with participants, identify strengths and weaknesses and help people see their own blind spots. While some companies try to build in-house management coaching capacity the challenges tend to include:

Internal coaches often have trouble separating their preconceived notions about their own organizations in order to start coaching from an unbiased perspective.

Internal coaches normally struggle to speak critically or work with more senior managers to address blind spots further up the hierarchy.

With internal coaches, their relative positions in the company can impede the coaching process. For instance a senior executive may have trouble accepting coaching from a junior employee due to the credibility gap while a lower lever manager may have trouble being coached by a senior executive due to the intimidation factor.

Internal coaches have a tendency to be too close to the business, lose objective insight, carry baggage (old history), and past relationships.

People may see an internal coach as a potential future boss, or peer that a person could be competing with. As such, the coaching relationship tends to lack depth.

3. Conversely, with 3rd Party Coaching Programs:

The External coach’s entire focus is making sure the individual and the initiative succeeds and is not distracted by internal politics or the day to day activity of the company.

External coaches actually uncover more information more easily because they are perceived as neutral by participants in the process.

External Coaches can leverage experiences and expertise brought from other companies within the same industry or even other industries and can establish credibility as specialists.

External coaching is time limited which creates the benefit that participants know they must become self-sufficient and that they can’t rely on the coach as to a crutch forever.

Because external coaching is time limited it is also typically less costly than internal programs where the cost becomes a fixed over head cost on the company.

An interesting crossover can occur in companies that use the same external coaching resources for very long periods of time (i.e. in excess of 3 years). In these situations, the external resources routinely lose their objectivity, become normalized to the characteristics of the client organization and become perceived as having their own biases and relationships with their client’s organization. When this occurs the advantages of be