What services does Thoroughgood Development offer?

We provide three core services: personalised 1:1 executive coaching, evidence-based training solutions for teams and leaders, and business psychology consultancy covering areas like employee engagement, culture, wellbeing, and organisational development.

Who is Thoroughgood Development for?

We work with growing organisations, senior leaders, HR teams, and individuals who want to develop their people. Our clients range from SMEs to large international organisations across all sectors.

Where is Thoroughgood Development based?

We are based in London (Covent Garden) and deliver services across the UK and internationally. Executive coaching and training are available both in-person and virtually.

How do I book a consultation?

Contact us through our website to schedule a free initial consultation. We will discuss your needs and recommend the most appropriate service, whether that is coaching, training, or psychology consultancy.

What makes your approach different?

Our founder Dale Thoroughgood is a qualified occupational psychologist (MSc, BPS member) with 20+ years of experience. Every solution is evidence-based, personalised, and designed to create measurable, lasting change — nothing is off the shelf.

Executive Coaching & Psychology London

HR and business leaders commission coaching with good intentions. A valued executive needs support. A high-potential leader is struggling to make the transition. A capable person is stuck. Coaching seems like the right answer. A provider is selected, a contract is signed, and sessions begin. What happens next is largely left to the coach and coachee. Six months later, when someone asks what changed, no one can quite say.

This pattern is common, and it is fixable. The evidence on what makes coaching work consistently points not just to coach quality but to how the organisation structures and supports the engagement. If you are commissioning coaching, you are not just a buyer. You have an active role to play, and it starts before the first session.

The Scale of the Investment

Coaching has become a serious organisational expenditure. According to the International Coaching Federation’s 2023 Global Coaching Study, the global coaching industry generated an estimated $4.564 billion USD in revenue in 2022, a 60 per cent increase since 2019. The number of practising coaches exceeded 100,000 for the first time. Organisations are spending more on coaching than at any point in history (ICF, 2023).

That investment, when well-managed, returns results. ICF research indicates that 86 per cent of organisations that tracked coaching return on investment reported positive returns, with a median of between five and seven times the original outlay. Improved self-confidence, better work performance, and stronger professional relationships are among the outcomes most consistently reported by coachees.

But the gap between coaching that works and coaching that drifts is not primarily determined by the quality of the coach you select. It is determined by how clearly the engagement has been defined, supported, and held to account. The research on coaching effectiveness, including a 2023 meta-analysis of 39 randomised controlled trial studies published in Frontiers in Psychology, confirms that goal clarity, coachee motivation, and organisational support are among the strongest predictors of positive outcomes (Frontiers in Psychology, 2023).

This puts HR leaders squarely in the frame.

Contracting Is Not Just for the Coach

One of the most important things HR leaders can do when commissioning coaching is to participate actively in the contracting process. Contracting in coaching is the stage at which goals, boundaries, roles, and expectations are made explicit. It is not a paperwork formality. It is the foundation on which the whole engagement stands.

In most coaching engagements, there are three parties involved: the coach, the coachee, and the commissioning organisation. The Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC) describes this as a three-way relationship in which trust, transparency, and alignment must be established among all parties from the outset. When the organisational sponsor steps back from this process and leaves contracting purely to the coach and coachee, crucial questions go unasked. What are we hoping changes? Over what timeframe? How will we know if it has worked?

The CIPD’s Coaching and Mentoring factsheet, updated in 2022, identifies this clearly: people professionals need to understand when coaching is appropriate, how to link it to the organisation’s wider learning and development strategy, and how to manage the engagement from a sponsor perspective throughout. That is not a passive role. It requires HR to be present, to set expectations, and to engage in a structured three-way conversation at the start.

What should that conversation cover? First, the goals of the engagement, and who owns them. Second, the boundaries of confidentiality. Third, the practical logistics: session frequency, duration, and review points. Fourth, what happens at the end.

Getting this right before the work begins prevents the most common source of coaching failure: a mismatch between what the organisation expects and what the coachee is working on.

Confidentiality and the Sponsor’s Role

Confidentiality is one of the points where HR leaders most often overcorrect. Concerned about undermining the coaching relationship, many sponsors withdraw entirely from contact with the coach. They do not want to be seen as monitoring the coachee, so they ask for nothing. The result is that they lose sight of the engagement entirely and have no basis on which to evaluate whether it is working.

The right approach is more nuanced. Coaching sessions are and should remain confidential. The specific content of what a coachee shares with their coach does not go back to the organisation. That confidentiality is not a luxury; it is a precondition for honest, productive work. A coachee who fears that their coach is reporting back to their line manager will not be open, and an engagement that lacks openness produces no insight.

What is not confidential, however, is progress. The goals of the engagement, and whether work is moving towards them, can and should be discussed. The AoEC framework for contracting in executive coaching distinguishes clearly between content confidentiality and progress visibility. HR can legitimately expect the coach to confirm that sessions are taking place, that the engagement is productive, and that the agreed goals remain the focus. What the coachee said, what difficulties they disclosed, and how the coaching relationship is experienced: none of that flows back.

Setting this up clearly at the contracting stage prevents confusion later. If a sponsor does not understand this distinction, they will either intrude where they should not or disengage where they should stay involved. Both undermine the engagement.

Goals That Work

Goal-setting in coaching is more complicated than it looks. The evidence is clear that coachee-owned goals, which the individual genuinely cares about and has chosen, produce better outcomes than organisationally-imposed objectives the coachee has merely agreed to. A meta-analysis of workplace coaching research found particularly strong effects on goal attainment when coachees had meaningful agency over the direction of their work (Frontiers in Psychology, 2023).

This creates a genuine tension for HR leaders. You are investing in coaching because you want to see something change. You may have a specific development need in mind. The natural instinct is to define the goal before the engagement begins and hand it to the coach. That instinct, while understandable, often backfires.

More effective practice is to define the territory rather than the destination. You might commission coaching to support a leader through a difficult people-management challenge without specifying the precise outcome you expect. You might identify that someone needs to develop their executive presence without prescribing how they should do it. This gives the coachee room to explore what is actually getting in their way, and it gives the coaching space to be genuinely developmental rather than remedial.

This does not mean goals are absent from the start. It means that goals are refined collaboratively during the early contracting phase, with input from the coachee, the coach, and the sponsor. A well-structured initial three-way meeting typically surfaces goals that are both personally meaningful to the coachee and aligned with the organisation’s reasons for commissioning the work. When that alignment is present, engagement is higher and outcomes are stronger.

The ICF and Human Capital Institute’s research on coaching cultures, published in 2023, found a strong correlation between employee engagement and the presence of coaching in organisations, with 72 per cent of respondents linking the two. That correlation is strongest where coaching is well-structured and where coachees experience genuine agency in the process.

Selecting the Right Coach

HR leaders often focus considerable energy on coach selection and then hand responsibility to the coachee once a shortlist has been drawn up. The selection process matters, but it is worth being clear about what you are selecting for.

Credentials are a necessary but insufficient criterion. ICF accreditation, for example, confirms that a coach has met internationally recognised standards of training and practice. The CIPD identifies professional body accreditation as a key quality indicator when commissioning external coaches. But credentials do not tell you whether a given coach is the right fit for a specific individual or challenge.

What matters alongside credentials is this: does the coach have experience relevant to the context? Coaching a senior leader through an organisational restructure requires different experience than coaching a first-time manager through a team-building challenge. Has the coach worked at a comparable level of organisational complexity? Can they demonstrate how they approach the contracting conversation with organisations, not just coachees?

The coachee’s own experience of the chemistry conversation matters significantly. Research consistently identifies the coaching relationship as one of the strongest predictors of outcome. Most experienced coaches will offer a chemistry meeting before a commitment is made. Build this into your commissioning process rather than treating it as optional.

Reviewing the Engagement Without Undermining It

Mid-point reviews are the single most underused tool in HR’s coaching toolkit. Most organisations commission a coaching programme, set it in motion, and then wait until it concludes before trying to assess whether it has worked. By that point, the opportunity to course-correct has gone.

A structured mid-point review, typically after three to five sessions, gives all three parties a chance to ask whether the engagement is on track. Is the coachee finding the work productive? Are the original goals still the right ones? Has anything emerged that suggests the direction needs adjusting? Does the sponsor still have the context needed to support the coachee in applying what they are learning?

This review does not need to be complex. A brief three-way conversation involving the coach, coachee, and sponsor, conducted with a clear understanding of what is and is not appropriate to discuss, is usually sufficient. The AoEC and ICF both recommend this as standard practice. In organisations where coaching is well-embedded, it is routine. In organisations where coaching is still ad hoc, it is rare.

The ICF/HCI Defining New Coaching Cultures report found that organisations with strong coaching cultures are significantly more likely to have formal evaluation processes in place. This is not coincidental. Evaluation requires structure, and structure is what turns individual coaching engagements into organisational capability.

When Coaching Is Not the Answer

A final and important point: not every development need requires coaching, and not every individual is ready for it at a given moment.

Coaching is most effective when the coachee is motivated to explore and change, when the challenge is developmental rather than purely technical, and when there is space and safety to do so. It is less effective when someone is experiencing a significant clinical mental health difficulty that requires therapeutic support rather than coaching. It is less effective when the problem is structural: a role that is poorly designed, a reporting line that is unworkable, a performance issue that has not been addressed through proper management channels.

HR leaders are sometimes drawn to coaching as a way of avoiding harder conversations. If a leader’s behaviour is causing genuine harm to those around them, coaching is not a substitute for addressing that directly. If someone’s performance is fundamentally unsuited to their role, coaching will not fix a structural misfit.

The CIPD is explicit that coaching should be positioned within a broader people development and performance management framework, not used as an alternative to it. Commissioning coaching in place of a difficult conversation, or as a last resort before a managed exit, rarely produces the intended result and risks wasting the investment and damaging the individual’s confidence in the process.

Running a Coaching Engagement Well

HR and business leaders who manage coaching engagements well do so by being clear about what they want and equally clear about where they step back. They participate in contracting, set expectations about progress visibility while protecting content confidentiality, and engage in a mid-point review. They select coaches with relevant experience and give coachees genuine agency in goal-setting. They use coaching for the right challenges and manage the ones coaching cannot fix through other means.

The most effective coaching engagements are not left to run themselves. They are held in the right kind of frame: structured enough to be purposeful, open enough to be genuine. That frame is the organisation’s responsibility to build, and HR leaders are the people best placed to build it.