Brewer Science set out to make coaching something leaders ask for
Coaching at Brewer Science carried the stigma of a performance warning. The L&D team set out to make it the opposite.
Industry
R&D and chemical manufacturing
Products used
Coaching
Brewer Science is a global R&D and chemical manufacturing company headquartered in Rolla, Missouri, with close to 500 employees worldwide. It grew from just over 300 in five years, and that growth is what put its leadership development under pressure.
“We’re working hard to provide an opportunity and show the benefits of coaching. It’s part of development and growth, not a punishment or a ‘you’re in trouble’ element.”
Catherine Taylor
Learning & Development, Brewer Science
The challenge
Coaching at Brewer Science had a reputation problem. It was something that happened to people who were struggling, close enough to a performance improvement plan that being offered it felt like a warning. “We’ve had, in our particular business, a shift in mentoring and coaching was considered like a negative, like, oh, that person’s on a PIP,” Catherine Taylor recalls. “So it had a very negative context.”
Underneath the perception problem was a structural one. What coaching existed ran on personal networks: an employee who knew the right person got a good mentor, and an employee who did not got nothing. The quality varied because nothing governed it. At 300 people that was survivable. At close to 500, with a widening bench of directors and executives who needed development the business could count on, it was not.
The team needed two things at once, and the second was harder than the first. They needed a coaching programme that could scale with consistent quality. And they needed the people it was offered to to want it.
What they did
Brewer Science evaluated six coaching platforms and selected SkillCycle for a pilot aimed at high-potential leaders moving into director and executive roles. Framing mattered as much as selection: coaching was positioned as executive development, the kind of investment a company makes in people it intends to promote, rather than a remedy.
Unlimited coaching within a licence, so a leader can meet six times in a difficult month and not at all in a quiet one
Seats that can be reassigned as people move, rather than being stranded with one user
Coaches the leader interviews and chooses, rather than being assigned centrally
That first point was the one that closed it. “We liked that flexibility,” Taylor said. “Understanding you might have three months and not really need so much, but then in a two-month period, you might need to meet six times because you’re going through a specific event.”
Coach matching run by the individual, not assigned centrally
Goals mapped to the competency model already used in reviews
Progress reported to the executive team quarterly
The result
Participants engaged, and reported conversations they valued. The L&D team gained visibility it had never had over an activity that used to happen off the books entirely, including time between sessions and coaching rates across the cohort.
The perception shift was the harder result and the one the team was watching. Taylor’s read on the handful of people not using their licence was that the platform was not the reason. “The few who aren’t engaged, it’s not because of SkillCycle. It’s just that they’re not prioritising the time.”
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