Ask a coaching lead how good their team is and you'll usually hear about member ratings, completion rates and the odd glowing email. Ask how they know a particular coach is still using the method they were trained in, and the answer gets vaguer.
That gap matters more than it sounds. The research on counseling skills says two uncomfortable things: people can't judge their own skill, and the skill fades when nobody's listening. Here's what that means for a coaching team, and a review routine that fits around a full caseload.
Why you can't ask coaches how they're doing
In a trial of 140 licensed addiction counselors learning motivational interviewing, Miller et al. (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2004) recorded their real practice sessions and scored them over a year. The counselors' own ratings of their skill had no relationship to how skilled they actually were on tape.
Those weren't health coaches, but the method was the same one most coaching programs teach, and the finding isn't surprising to anyone who's run a team. Confident coaches aren't always the good ones. Anxious ones are often better than they think.
So a self-assessment form, a quarterly check-in where the coach says how things are going, or a lead's general impression won't tell you much. The only reliable evidence is the session itself.
Coaching skills fade without feedback
Most teams train hard at the start and then stop. A new coach gets a workshop, some shadowing and a few reviewed sessions, and after that they're on their own.
A meta-analysis of 21 training studies, Schwalbe et al. (Addiction, 2014), looked at what happened to counseling staff after motivational interviewing training. Where nobody gave follow-up feedback, skills eroded over the next six months. Where trainees got feedback or coaching after the workshop, the skills didn't fade.
That's not a heavy load. It works out to about one hour-long conversation every five weeks. The authors say the dose still needs confirming in a proper experiment, and we didn't find a trial that tested it with health coaches, but we'd plan around the same rhythm until someone does.
How coaching quality assurance works in practice
You don't need a supervisor on every call. You need a small, steady sample and a consistent way to score it. Here's the routine we'd set up.
What to listen for in a coaching session
Keep the checklist short enough to use. These are the five things we'd score, whatever coaching method your team uses.
- Who's doing the talking? If the coach talks more than the member, something's off.
- Reflections, not just questions. Good coaches say back what they've heard. A session that's all questions feels like an interview.
- Whose goal is it? The goal should be in the member's words and the member's reasons, not the coach's.
- Advice with permission. Coaches give information, but the good ones ask first.
- A specific next step. The session should end with one concrete action and a date, which also makes the note easy to write. Our guide to health coaching notes covers what goes in it.
If your team trained in motivational interviewing and wants something more formal, there's an established research scoring tool for it, the MITI. For most coaching operations, a checklist like this one does the job.
What member ratings can't tell you
Member satisfaction is worth tracking, and ours is high. In a 2023 study covering nearly 700 participants, members rated Avidon coaching 4.7 out of 5. We're proud of that number.
But it tells you members like their coaches. It doesn't tell you whether a coach is still reflecting or has slid into giving advice, and it won't show you which one coach on a team of ten needs help. Satisfaction and skill are two different measures. You need both, and only one of them comes from listening.
Making review fit a full caseload
The objection is always time, so here's the arithmetic. Twenty minutes of listening, ten minutes of scoring, and an hour-long conversation every five weeks or so comes to a little over an hour per coach a month, by our estimate. For a ten-coach team, that's about thirteen hours of a lead's month.
You can spread that load. In the study that tested the scoring tool (Moyers et al., Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 2016), four undergraduates with no clinical background were trained to score real session recordings, and they scored them reliably. There's no reason experienced coaches can't review each other the same way, with the lead calibrating everyone once a month.
Quality is a system, not a hunch
Most coaching teams find out about a quality problem from a member complaint or a client renewal call. By then it's been going on for months.
A small, regular sample changes that. You see drift early, coaches get feedback that's specific to them, and you can show a client how you know your coaching is good, not just that members are happy.
For a coaching company selling on quality, a review routine like this is an easy answer to give a buyer who asks how you know your coaches are good.
