People and Leadership
EY delivered an Executive Coaching Service for the Cabinet Office to enable senior Civil Servants to lead more effectively. By delivering executive coaching to over 5,000 Civil Service leaders, the programme has seen significant uptake and delivered high impact to employees working on critical national projects.
In 2020, the Cabinet Office asked the EY team to deliver an Executive Coaching Service that would enable senior civil servants to lead more effectively. At the time, civil servants were operating against a backdrop of rapid change and uncertainty – responding to challenges such as COVID-19, mass migration and climate change, while managing our country’s departure from the EU. All this, after a decade of austerity. Leaders of the civil service were being asked to steer their people through near-constant change, while operating under enormous levels of scrutiny from ministers, the media and the public. In this context, they needed to be at their best.
Since then, the EY team has been working alongside the Cabinet Office to deliver executive coaching to over 5,000 civil service leaders. The success of this five-year partnership has been built on a shared objective to improve citizen outcomes by enhancing the leadership and performance of Civil Servants.
The Executive Coaching Service offers civil servants personalised 1:1 leadership development and support. To deliver the service, the EY team have established and gradually refreshed a diverse pool of 130 executive coaches with wide-ranging experiences and areas of expertise. As a result, civil servants can now work with former Permanent Secretaries, professional athletes, C-suite executives, and published authors – with specialisms in areas ranging from neurodivergent communication to conflict resolution.
EY stood up a team of dedicated Client Value Leads (CVLs), responsible for supporting a cluster of government departments and agencies. These CVLs partnered with their clients to scope coaching programmes, brief coaches and analyse the impact of coaching – exploring alignment between the goals of the coachee and the organisation – and have been responsible for driving continuous improvement of the Coaching Service across client experience, coachee experience and coach experience. Here, regular surveys and consultation exercises are informing ongoing enhancements to the Service such as:
- An integrated video platform to mitigate information security risks
- An algorithmic matching tool to help leaders find the right coach
- On-demand reporting on coaching impact themes
- Concierge matching service for the most senior leaders
To demonstrate impact, the EY team introduced personalised reports for clients – available on demand – to outline the impact of their leaders’ coaching engagements. To support the learning and effectiveness of coaches, monthly continuous professional development (CPD) sessions are hosted.
Overall, the EY team has helped deliver 26,000 hours of high-quality coaching to over 90 government departments and agencies and 5,000 civil servants. Ninety-nine per cent of civil servants who have completed a coaching engagement indicate that they would recommend it to a colleague – and many of them do so. We have seen a 92% increase in the number of civil servants accessing coaching. In addition, 90% of coachees surveyed at the end of their coaching engagement stated that coaching improved their impact – in critical areas such as delivering the UK’s COVID-19 vaccination programme, negotiating multi-billion-pound trade deals and supporting Ukraine through the Russian invasion.
View the EY profile in the MCA Members Directory.