At Lattice, an inclusive approach to coaching is a success for employees and the organization.

 

Lattice works with people teams across the globe to turn employees into high performers, managers into leaders, and companies into the best places to work. It’s a mission they take seriously. When they were looking to develop their own leaders, they turned to the people development platform, Torch, for coaching and mentoring.

 

Lattice Makes Intentional Investment in Coaching to Develop Its People

Lattice chooses to invest in coaching and mentoring because of the depth and richness it offers as a development opportunity. Kelsey Poleyeff, Learning and Development Program Manager at Lattice, describes how they think about and position coaching to their employees: “This is your time. This is an intentional investment that Lattice is making into you as an individual, as a leader of a team, as a leader in our organization, and as a high-potential person, to help you in your career growth overall. This is your opportunity to meet with someone outside of Lattice who can give you insights, advice, and guidance to help you as you navigate growing in your career.”

 

Lattice is intentional about the purpose of their coaching program with Torch–that it is a development opportunity, not a performance management opportunity. “We are very clear in our framing with our people partners, leaders, and managers that this not something that’s being assigned to them to help them if they’re struggling. That’s a different process. This is a development opportunity for people who are taking on a new team, whose team has undergone changes recently, or someone that we really want to show an investment in.”

Key Highlights

• Coaching program enables the development of leadership skills for people managers across the organization
• Lattice built greater equity into leadership development with 6-month rotational coaching program
• More leaders are able to experience coaching through inclusive, intentional programs, and program management is simplified by the Torch platform

Moving from exclusive to inclusive for sought-after coaching program

From the beginning, coaching was a sought after program among employees. But after the Learning and Development team reviewed data about who was going through it, they discovered only certain employees were taking advantage of it: mostly men. They saw an opportunity to apply their priorities and values around culture and inclusion to the initiative, and asked themselves the question: ‘How can we build this [initiative] in a way that makes sure this is equitable across the board, and doesn’t give some people an undue advantage?’

 

“It’s really important for us to make sure this offering can be available to different people,” Kelsey shared. “Even the opportunity to be in coaching for six months longer than someone else can offer you a leg up that maybe someone else wouldn’t have,” she continued.

To build greater equity into their initiative, they created a six-month rotational coaching program. This means one cohort experiences coaching for the first six months, and then they swap existing participants with a new cohort every six months. The nomination process focuses on people managers and ties to talent reviews, so the Lattice team focus on managers as their target group. During the talent review process leaders are told: “This is your moment to think about who you want to intentionally invest in for the next six months,” says Kelsey, and seats are allocated accordingly.

 

The benefit of the rotational approach is that employees who aren’t part of the program are less likely to feel they have missed out on an opportunity. “They [know] they could have the opportunity to be in the program in the next six months,” Kelsey said. She also added that program participation is highly sought after at Lattice, and the inclusive nature of the selection process means that “coaching is something that people could work towards and earn but not something that felt so out of reach for them.” And from the company’s perspective, they are able to get a lot more people through the program by using flexible seats.

Benefits of coaching with Torch

“Coaching [with Torch] is pretty easy in comparison to some other coaching processes I’ve been through,” according to Kelsey. “Without a platform you might be scheduling individuals on your own and you may not be able to vet coaches fully. The ability to have that centralized in one place, and having the Torch team be hands-on in that process, is a big benefit for Lattice.”

 

One of the best endorsements of Lattice’s coaching and mentoring programs is the continuous demand for participation in both coaching and mentoring.