Gain Insights Into Coaching Themes

The Coaching Themes report helps you keep a pulse on what your participants are working on in coaching so you can better understand their needs. Unlike static surveys, coaching themes provide real-time data and unbiased feedback about what’s really happening at your organization so you can spot patterns early, understand root causes, and take targeted action.

Read on to learn more about how the report works and the data it includes.

Where to find this report

From the left-hand navigation, go to Reports > Coaching themes.

How the report works

First, coaches record themes of what participants are working on in coaching. After every coaching session, Torch coaches are required to record the 1-3 main developmental themes from their conversation with the participant. Coaches select from 25+ dynamic theme topics bucketed into seven main categories:

• Communication and collaboration

• Leadership and influence

• Managing time and tasks

• Navigating change

• Strategy and innovation

• Understanding yourself and your development

• Work-life balance and well-being

While recording meeting themes, coaches can also submit a request for any missing theme topics. Theme requests are reviewed regularly by the Torch Product team and implemented as new trends emerge to ensure the theme options capture what’s really happening in coaching.

Then, you get insight into what your coaching participants are focused on. The Coaching Themes report aggregates the coach-recorded theme data across all coaching participants from your organization.

Note: Strict confidentiality is maintained by not recording or transcribing sessions. To further protect participant privacy, a minimum threshold of three coaching participants is required before you’ll have access to themes data. The same three participant minimum requirement also applies to themes data filtered by specific programs, cohorts, and date ranges.

At the top, you’ll see the 3 main leadership capacities your people are developing in coaching. Click into each one to learn more about what it means and the key behaviors for demonstrating strong leadership.

Next you’ll find a summary of what’s being talked about in coaching and a visual and numerical breakdown of how the coaching conversations your people are having roll up into the main theme categories.

Under “Explore themes by category”, select a category to view the most popular topics from that category and how they are trending over time.

To narrow down to coaching themes for specific programs, cohorts, or dates, use the filter options in the top-left of the report. Once you’ve made your filter selections, click Apply.

Torch tip: To save a copy of the report, click Download PDF in the top-right.

Understanding the data

A deeper dive into the information presented in the Coaching Themes report.

Note: The Coaching Themes report is designed with participant privacy in mind. The data points are meant to give you insight into what your people are working on in coaching without the ability to identify participants based on reported themes, or associate themes to a specific individual.

[Your Organization]’s leadership capacities

• Top leadership capacities - Lists the 3 main leadership capacities your people are developing.

How does Torch identify the leadership capacities my participants are working on?

We mapped all the themes coaches can select when capturing what participants are talking about in coaching to leadership capacities. The report weights the leadership capacities associated with each recorded theme (not the high-level conversation categories) based on how frequently each theme occurs.

For example, let’s say your participants completed 20 meetings. The “Improving team performance” theme was most popular, occurring 12 times, or in 60% of meetings. That 60% weighting is applied to the theme’s mapped leadership capacity: Talent Cultivation. The report looks at all recorded themes comprehensively in the same way to surface the leadership capacities your people are developing.

What’s being talked about at [Your Organization]

• Themes summary - An overview of the top two theme categories and the top two topics most frequently discussed in each.

• Participant count - The total number of participants with at least one coaching theme recorded by their coach in the stated date range.

• Date range - The date of the first theme recorded to the date of the most recent theme recorded for your coaching program participants. You can use the date range filter at the top to adjust the timeframe you want to see data for.

• Conversation categories - Lists the percentage of participants with least 1 recorded theme in each main category, with an accompanying donut chart displaying a visual breakdown of this info. Here’s an example of how the percentages are calculated: If a participant has 2 themes recorded in the “Leadership and influence” category and 1 theme recorded in the “Communication and collaboration” category, they will be counted once in each category.

Explore themes by category

• Themes trending over time - The number of participants with at least 1 recorded theme within your selected category at different points of time across the report’s stated date range. Hover your cursor over the trend line to see the count of participants working on that theme during a given point-in-time. A single participant can be represented on the trend line multiple times for the same theme category but only once per point-in-time. By including multiple occurrences of a single participant working on the selected theme, the trend line shows how that theme remains relevant (or not) over time. Specific date stamps of the coach-submitted themes are hidden to ensure participant privacy.

• Popular themes by total count - The most frequently occurring themes within your selected category. The counts for each topic are based on the number of participants with at least 1 theme recorded for that topic. A single participant can be represented in multiple topics. For example, if a participant has 2 themes recorded for the “Managing up” topic and 1 theme recorded for the “Improving team performance” topic, they will be counted once for each topic. This means the total count across all listed topics will not equal the number of coaching participants with a theme recorded in the main category you selected.

Note: The sum of the values in the “Themes trending over time” chart typically won’t equal the sum of the “Popular themes by total count”. This is because one participant can be counted in multiple point-in-time values on the trend chart, but only once per topic in the popular themes count.