Part 2 - What You'd Actually Measure in a Lean Six Sigma Coach

In Part 1, I argued that Lean Six Sigma measures everything except the one role that most determines whether a practitioner and project succeeds — the coach — and that we select coaches on an untested assumption: that a belt and a teaching gig imply the ability to coach.

So let's get concrete. If you were going to measure a coach, what would you look at — and how do you do it without turning a respected Master Black Belt into a surveilled employee?

Three dimensions, and then the two rules that keep it honest.

1. Effectiveness — are their practitioners actually getting good?

The most-cited definition of coaching effectiveness in sports science is telling: it isn't the coach's résumé, it's the improvement in the people they coach — their competence, confidence, and results (Côté & Gilbert, 2009). Translate that to Lean Six Sigma and it gets concrete: do this coach's practitioners reach confirmed root causes? Complete and certify? Stop repeating the same mistakes? That's quality — measured by outcomes, not by how pleasant the sessions felt.

2. Responsiveness — when a practitioner is stuck, do they wait hours or days?

Someone who hits a wall on Tuesday and doesn't hear back until the next session has lost a week. Getting "unstuck" is where projects are won or lost, and it happens between sessions. How fast a coach responds — and how quickly issues actually resolve — is a real, measurable signal of whether coaching is happening in the gap, or only in the calendar invite.

3. Load — is the coach carrying more than they can coach well?

This is the one nobody tracks, and the evidence is unambiguous. A rapid evidence review of clinical supervision found the number-one barrier to quality was time and heavy workload (Rothwell et al., 2021); broader caseload research shows mentoring quality falls as caseloads rise — especially for less-experienced people, which is exactly your Green Belts. A coach with too many active projects isn't a hero; they're a bottleneck in waiting, and every practitioner under them is quietly under-served.

The two rules that keep it honest

Here's where measuring coaches usually goes wrong. Two things have to be true, or it curdles into surveillance.

Rule 1: Satisfaction is not effectiveness. The Kirkpatrick model of training evaluation draws a hard line between a learner's reaction (did they enjoy it?) and results (did anything actually change?), and reminds us the first is a weak guide to the second (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2016). The coach everyone loves isn't automatically the one who makes people better — sometimes it's the one who pushes back hardest and is, in the moment, least comfortable. Measure only "how did that feel," and you reward the crowd-pleaser and punish the coach who builds real capability. Hold sentiment and outcomes side by side; never confuse them.

Rule 2: The point is to help, not to judge. The best reason to measure a coach's load isn't to rank them — it's to protect them, and the clients they'd otherwise let down. The best reason to measure responsiveness isn't to catch them slacking — it's to notice, before anyone complains, that a good coach has quietly taken on too much. Done well, measuring a coach is exactly what a great coach does for a practitioner: pays close attention, so they can help before things go wrong.

Turning the lens on ourselves

Lean Six Sigma taught the world that improvement starts with honest measurement. For decades we've aimed that lens at every process in the building — except the coaching that quietly determines whether any of those projects succeed. Every discipline that has looked — workplace coaching, clinical supervision, sports — has found that coach quality is measurable, varies widely, and moves outcomes. Ours simply hasn't looked.

So here's the question worth sitting with: how do you actually know your Lean Six Sigma coaches are effective? If the honest answer is "we assume they are" — that isn't a Lean Six Sigma answer. And it may be the most important process you've never measured.

(This is exactly what we're building into the Sensei Elite coaching console — but the question stands whether you use our tools or not.)

References

Côté, J., & Gilbert, W. (2009). An integrative definition of coaching effectiveness and expertise. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 4(3), 307–323. https://doi.org/10.1260/174795409789623892

Kirkpatrick, J. D., & Kirkpatrick, W. K. (2016). Kirkpatrick's four levels of training evaluation. ATD Press.

Rothwell, C., Kehoe, A., Farook, S. F., & Illing, J. (2021). Enablers and barriers to effective clinical supervision in the workplace: A rapid evidence review. BMJ Open, 11(9), Article e052929. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-052929