Before evaluating a coaching programme, decide what it is intended to change. A learner's experience, a change in behaviour and an organisational result are different outcomes.

From an evaluation question to a transformation question

The question this article started with was narrow: how should we evaluate coaching? Working with organisations that use HALO to implement and sustain change points to a broader question. What role does coaching, and the wider reflective and organisational-development support around it, play when a workforce is being asked to learn a new clinical skill, change how a service runs, and then hold that change once the training itself has finished?

Coaching sits inside that broader picture. It is not a wellbeing extra added on to a training programme. Used well, it is one part of the infrastructure that helps people carry change, alongside technical learning, trained trainers, implementation leadership and the structures that give people somewhere to think while the work is actually happening.

What the commentary contributes

Woods, Jones and Guillaume reflect on a decade of workplace-coaching research. They describe a growing evidence base while identifying continuing questions about how coaching works, how outcomes are defined and which features matter in a particular context.

This is a research commentary, not a new clinical trial or a validation of VeinTrain's services. Its discussion offers a way to ask more precise questions about development at work.

Specify the intended change

The authors call for outcome measures that fit the objectives, design and setting of the coaching. They also identify the need to examine whether changes are maintained over time.

When planning an evaluation, record:

• the purpose agreed with the person receiving coaching;
• what evidence would show progress towards that purpose;
• when progress will be reviewed;
• which contextual factors could affect the result.

These are planning questions derived from the commentary. They are not a validated assessment instrument.

Coaching within the HALO architecture

HALO is built as a ladder of increasing depth, not a single fixed package: Learn, Practise, Teach, Implement, Connect, Lead, Transform. Not every deployment needs every layer, and where an organisation already has its own coaching or organisational-development infrastructure, HALO is designed to connect with that infrastructure rather than reproduce it.

• Learn and Practise - the technical skill itself: venepuncture, IV cannulation and IV line care, delivered to a defined standard.
• Teach - Train the Trainer, building local capability to sustain the skill.
• Implement - putting the skill to work inside a real service, with the practical problems that involves.
• Connect - linking that local implementation to the wider system: governance, existing organisational-development and coaching resource, and peer networks.
• Lead and Transform - the level at which coaching, reflective practice and structured group space become part of how the change is held, not just how the skill is taught.

For larger or Platinum-level transformation programmes, this deeper layer of reflective and coaching infrastructure can be designed into the implementation architecture where agreed with the organisation. It is not an automatic inclusion at every tier. [NEEDS SARAH CHECK - please confirm this wording against the current HALO Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum package definitions before it is used in any commercial copy.]

The trainer as more than a technical instructor

Train the Trainer is usually described as a technical pathway: someone learns a clinical skill well enough to teach it to others. In practice, a trainer who is asked to help implement a new skill inside a real service is doing more than that. They often translate a new standard into daily practice, support individual learners through the early, uncertain stage of a new skill, act as a clinical resource colleagues turn to when something doesn't go to plan, and link what is happening on the ground back to governance.

That is a demanding role, and it is not the same as being an accredited coach. Recognising it, and giving trainers somewhere to think about the implementation problems they are carrying, is part of what makes Train the Trainer sustainable rather than a one-off event.

A coaching system, not just individual coaches

A single coach, however good, is not an infrastructure. A coaching system needs a clear route in for someone who needs support; clarity about what each role is for, so a trainer, a coach and a line manager are not quietly doing the same job in different ways; a sensible way of matching people to the right kind of support; group spaces as well as one-to-one support; a route to escalate or refer on when the need goes beyond what the programme can offer; enough local capability that it does not depend permanently on outside input; and a way for what is learned through coaching conversations to feed back into how the programme itself is designed.

VeinTrain does not present itself as the only provider of this kind of support. Depending on what an organisation already has, the right architecture may involve building local capacity, working alongside an organisation's existing coaches or OD team, VeinTrain-led coaching and facilitation, specialist associates, or referral to an established provider such as Tavistock Consulting for deeper systems-psychodynamic or organisational work. [VTHQ-CHECK - confirm any further named specialist referral partners before publication; Tavistock Consulting is currently the only externally verified reference.]

Leadership Circles

One of the mechanisms being developed within HALO's reflective infrastructure is the Leadership Circle: a structured, protected group space for the people carrying a change, trainers, implementation leads and local clinical leaders, to think together about what the change is asking of them, rather than simply reporting progress against it. The starting question for a Leadership Circle is simple: who needs a thinking space for this transformation to work?

This is a developing part of the HALO model, shaped around specific programmes rather than a pre-existing accredited product, and it draws on an established tradition of group reflective practice rather than inventing the idea from nothing.

Organisational Role Analysis

Many of the difficulties people describe when a change is being implemented are not really about the technical skill. They are about role: what a person is being asked to do, what authority they have to do it, where the boundaries of their responsibility sit, how their role connects to the people around them, and what the wider organisational context is asking of them at the same time.

Organisational Role Analysis, a method with roots in the Tavistock tradition of systems-psychodynamic work, gives a structured way to look at task, role, authority, boundaries, relationships and context together. Within HALO, this thinking is used to help leaders, trainers and implementation leads make sense of the role they are actually occupying during a change, not just the job description they started with.

Spaces for thinking, spaces for doing

Transformation needs spaces for doing the work and spaces for thinking about it, with deliberate movement between the two. VeinTrain's own implementation approach, Define Enough, Deploy, Observe, Co-design, Adapt, Scale, is built around that same movement: define enough to start safely, deploy, observe what actually happens, bring people back together to co-design the next step, adapt, and only then scale.

This is not a new idea. The late Sir David Nabarro and the 4SD Foundation have written about the value of dialogue, working across boundaries and learning while acting as ways of strengthening systems during change, and about the importance of structured spaces where people can think together rather than simply be told what to do. [DIRECT QUOTE PENDING - the late Sir David Nabarro / 4SD. An exact primary-source quotation should be inserted here once checked against the internal Nabarro research file; the sentence above is a paraphrase, not a quotation.] A related 2020 WHO/Europe briefing set out themes that speak directly to this: strategic principles paired with local adaptation, consistent communication, and transparent monitoring and accountability. [VTHQ-CHECK - confirm the exact briefing title and date before this is used as a public citation.]

Tavistock Consulting describes reflective practice and action learning as ways that help groups of leaders learn together, and its work with NHS leadership teams has focused on protecting space for people to think about role, authority, boundaries and the wider system while change is actually happening. [DIRECT QUOTE PENDING - a specific published Tavistock phrase on "space for thinking during transformation" has not yet been verified against a primary source and should not be used in quotation marks until confirmed; the sentence above is a paraphrase.] HALO's Leadership Circles are built on the same logic: implementation moves faster, and holds better, when people are given somewhere to think, not only somewhere to report.

Learning from Nottingham and Nottinghamshire ICS

This approach did not start as a marketing model. It reflects earlier system-level work Sarah Phillips has been part of. Public strategy material from Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Integrated Care System describes a Community of Practice supporting organisational-development and improvement work across a workforce of around 70,000 people, including an "Exemplar Hub - Coaching" test-and-learn strand. In August 2024, a "Coaching for leaders" session within that strand was led by Mat Daniels, with support from Sarah Phillips, Rebecca Chellaswamy and Montio Morgan. [VTHQ-CHECK - a Cambridge connection referenced in an earlier draft of Mat Daniels' biography is unverified and has been left out until confirmed.]

The same public material records Sarah's involvement in the co-design of the system's Talent and Leadership approach, including accelerated design work, a Talent and Leadership Design Council, and wider system-partner comment and governance. [VTHQ-CHECK - please confirm the exact verb the public source supports (led / co-designed / coordinated / provided subject-matter oversight for) before this is used publicly; it should not be read as Sarah having authored the strategy alone.] This is offered as evidence of prior experience building this kind of infrastructure, not as an endorsement of VeinTrain or HALO by the ICS.

The ICS's Innovation Challenges programme, described publicly as whole-system inclusive programmes and dialogues, is a useful worked example of a different scale of thinking-and-doing space. A major Innovation Challenge can bring a large system together. A Community of Practice sustains relationships and learning over time. A Leadership Circle creates a smaller, protected thinking space. Coaching provides individual depth. An implementation dashboard makes the action visible. HALO's transformation architecture is designed to combine these forms according to the scale of the change involved.

[ACTION PENDING - connect this section to the Louise workstream once the correct project and contact are confirmed; no clear matching internal record has yet been located.]

A layered model of thinking spaces

Put together, this suggests a layered model rather than a single intervention: briefings that share orientation and intelligence across a system; a Community of Practice that sustains peer connection and learning between formal sessions, carries informal intelligence back to programme leaders and develops shared language across boundaries; Leadership Circles that give structured reflection space on implementation and role; coaching and role consultation that give individual or small-group depth; Innovation Challenges that mobilise a whole system around a shared problem; and dashboards that make coordination, decisions and implementation intelligence visible. None of these replaces the others. Together, they form transformation infrastructure rather than a set of disconnected interventions.

The thinking behind the model

Ideas and practice that inform our approach (this is not an endorsement of VeinTrain or HALO by any of the people or organisations named below):

• The late Sir David Nabarro and the 4SD Foundation - on systems leadership, dialogue, local adaptation and learning through action. [DIRECT QUOTE PENDING]
• Tavistock Consulting - on role, authority, systems-psychodynamic thinking, reflective practice and protected space for thinking during transformation.
• Manfred Kets de Vries - on the value of group and team-based leadership development, as a counterweight to assuming all development should be one-to-one executive coaching. [see attribution note below]
• Simon Western - on networked and distributed leadership, and the relationship between individual leaders and the wider system. [QUOTE/LINK PENDING - no clean, verifiable public quotation has yet been sourced]
• Nottingham and Nottinghamshire ICS - a Community of Practice, coaching test-and-learn work and co-designed Talent and Leadership infrastructure reaching a workforce of around 70,000.

Attribution note: an earlier draft of this material attributed the line "leadership is a team sport" to Manfred Kets de Vries via INSEAD Knowledge. Checking the primary source shows that line belongs to Graham Ward, writing on INSEAD Knowledge, not to Kets de Vries. It has been corrected here: the reference above points instead to Kets de Vries' own published work on group and team leadership coaching. [NEEDS SARAH CHECK - please confirm you are happy with this correction.]

Keep the boundaries visible

Evidence about workplace coaching should not be presented as proof of clinical competency or patient outcomes. Nor should findings about human coaching be assumed to apply unchanged to AI coaching. The authors identify that transfer as a question needing research.

The same boundary applies to AI more broadly. AI tools can help organise material, prompt reflection or surface useful questions. They are not a substitute for professional coaching, clinical supervision or organisational governance.

Widening the evaluation framework

The planning questions above, purpose, evidence of progress, review point, contextual factors, still apply to an individual coaching relationship. At transformation scale, it is useful to think across several connected levels, as a thinking framework rather than a validated instrument:

• learner or participant experience;
• individual behaviour change;
• leadership and role capability;
• team or faculty functioning;
• implementation outcomes;
• organisational or system outcomes;
• sustainability over time.

A programme can look successful at one level, such as learner satisfaction, while the harder question of whether the change has actually been implemented and held remains open. Evaluating deliberately at every level is part of taking the original question in this article seriously.

Where this leaves the question

The technical training matters. The human system that has to carry the change matters just as much.

HALO is not only a clinical training architecture. At transformation level it can create the structures through which people learn, practise, lead, think together and adapt while implementation is happening. The spaces may be different sizes, but the principle is consistent: create somewhere for people to make sense together, connect that thinking to real work, and feed what is learned back into the system.

Source and next step - We are discussing this more in our community and further exploration continues in our Halo Interactive Intelligence Hub - Join us!

Woods, S.A., Jones, R.J. and Guillaume, Y.R.F. (2026). Coaching and its effectiveness in organizations: Reflecting on a decade of research, looking forward to future challenges. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 99, e70115. DOI: 10.1111/joop.70115.

Use the questions above to clarify your evaluation plan, then explore the clinical and learning toolkits for related learning and assessment topics.

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