How to Build an Internal Coaching or Consulting Function That Delivers Value

Editor’s Note: Internal coaching and consulting teams can become strategic force multipliers — or quietly disappear when budgets tighten. This guide outlines practical principles for designing, scaling, and leading internal coaching or consulting functions that deliver real business value.

How to Build an Internal Coaching or Consulting Function That Actually Delivers Value

I’ve spent much of my career building and leading internal coaching and consulting functions.

Done well, these teams help leaders grow, teams perform, and change actually land. Done poorly, they become expensive centres of excellence — well-liked, lightly used, and first in line for cuts.

This guide shares the principles I use when setting up, scaling, or leading internal coaching and consulting teams — the lessons I learned the hard way.

Note: For Studio members there are downloadable diagrams and field notes related to this guidance.

This essay can also be explored in audio form. You’re welcome to listen — or continue reading below.

Coaching vs Consulting: Know What You’re Setting Up

Before structure, budget, or hiring, get clarity on intent.

• Coaching focuses on developing people — behaviours, skills, judgement, and growth.
• Consulting focuses on solving problems — advice, analysis, frameworks, and execution support.

Most internal teams blend both.
That’s fine — but be explicit about the mix.

Misalignment here is one of the most common failure modes: leaders expect solutions, while coaches offer guidance (or vice versa).

Define the balance clearly, and hire accordingly.

Cost: The First Reality Check

Internal teams are always a cost. It's why it's essential to connect the work done to value realised – value that may not have been realised without the coaching or consulting team.

Good feedback and happy stakeholders are not enough.
You must connect your work to external business value, such as:

• Faster delivery
• Higher quality
• Improved retention
• Reduced operational cost
• Increased revenue

Some functions exist for compliance or safety. Most coaching and consulting functions do not.
Keep the value thread explicit from day one.

Purpose: Why You Exist

Every internal function needs ruthless clarity of purpose:

• What problems do we solve?
• What opportunities do we unlock?
• What outcomes define success?

Be explicit:

• We do this.
• We could do this.
• We will not do this.

Overextension kills credibility.
Busy does not mean valuable.

Products and Services: Package Your Value

Translate purpose into a clear service offering.
A menu of offers and services is a good starting ground (example below for Studio members).

Importantly, this menu is not a client-facing artefact.
It exists for internal orientation and judgement.
Internal clients do not want menus; they want problems resolved.

The discipline lies in translation.

From the full set of things you could do, you select the small number you can credibly deliver, and compose these into a coherent response to the need presented.

The menu is possibility; the solution is authorship.

Think modular, client-centred offerings. Offerings that solve business problems:

• Management coaching programmes
• Agile or operating model adoption
• Portfolio governance support
• Team effectiveness diagnostics

Avoid vague positioning (“We help with change”).
Lead with tangible outcomes that matter to internal clients.

Start narrow.
Expand deliberately.

Abilities vs Capabilities: Know Your Limits

A critical distinction:

• Ability = you can deliver this today.
• Capability = you could deliver this with development.

Teams often promise based on aspiration, not ability.
Protect your reputation: offer what you can deliver now, and build capability intentionally through pairing, mentoring, and development – always aligned to the demand and changing needs of internal clients and the business.

Demand: Qualify and Align

Not all demand is good demand.

Value-aligned demand:

• Faster time-to-market
• Quality improvement
• Retention and engagement
• Cost reduction
• Revenue growth

Misaligned demand:

• Slide decks and reporting donkey work
• Low-impact administrative work
• Cosmetic initiatives with no outcome
• Facilitation with no value aligned

Qualify requests. Say yes deliberately. Keep an exit plan for low-value work.

Demand Generation: Internal Sales and Marketing

Internal services do not sell themselves.

Think in stages:

1. Awareness – share insights, models, and thinking. Ideas, content, communities – things that help people and subtly promote your service.
2. Free Gifts for Friends – small workshops, short focussed facilitation or advisory engagements.
3. Short Engagements – 4–8 week outcome-focused interventions.
4. Long Engagements – 6–12 month transformations or long term work.

This isn’t sales for the sake of it. It’s helping leaders understand what value is possible.

Delivery and Value: Execute with Discipline

Every engagement should answer:

• What is being done?
• Who owns what?
• What problem is being solved?
• What value is expected?
• How will progress be measured?
• When does it start and end?

Core artefacts:

• Coaching / Consulting Agreement
• Monthly Review cadence
• Close-out summary with outcomes and next steps
• Case study or testimonial

Build recovery time into delivery cycles to maintain quality and energy amongst the teams.

Continuous Improvement: Make the Function Indispensable

Regularly ask:

• How can we generate more value with less cost?
• How can we sharpen our offerings?
• How can we develop our team’s abilities?
• How can we communicate impact better?
• How can we learn from previous work?

Internal teams are rarely cut for being expensive (if they can trace a path to value).
They are cut for being invisible.

Embedded Ability: Designing Your Own Redundancy

The most effective coaching and consulting functions are designed to make themselves unnecessary.

Not through withdrawal, but through deliberate transfer of judgement, knowledge, behaviours, skills and cability into the organisation itself.

In other words, the business teams we are working with must be able to sustain the improvements, ways of working etc, without always relying on internal coaching functions.

This is not “training a team.”
Teams do not learn
— individuals do.
Enduring organisational ability is always carried by identifiable people.

Note: For Studio members there is "developing capability" field sheet for this article at the end of this guide.

The task, therefore, is twofold:

1. Identify Capability

Within any group there are individuals who possess not just current skill, but the ability to become capable — curiosity, judgement, reflection, and the willingness to practise.

These are not always the most senior people, nor the loudest. They are typically the ones who ask better questions, synthesise information, and demonstrate behavioural growth.

Select them deliberately.
Work with them intentionally.
Treat them as future stewards rather than temporary participants.

2. Embed Specific, Transferable Judgement

Generic information fades and morphs as support moves on.
Context-specific judgement endures.

The aim is not to “upskill” in the abstract, but to embed:

• How decisions are made here
• How trade-offs are evaluated
• How priorities are set
• How progress is reviewed
• How recovery happens when things drift
• How work moves from idea to value

This is the difference between teaching a framework and transferring the ability to interpret reality.

Endurance Over Dependence

Coaching and consulting should leave behind:

• Named individuals who can continue the work
• Artefacts and routines that outlive the engagement
• Language that becomes native rather than imported
• Confidence in intervention — and restraint in non-intervention

If the work requires your continued presence to function, ability has not been embedded — dependency has been created.

Design for Exit from the Beginning

An explicit exit horizon sharpens behaviour on both sides.
It changes conversations from “What should we do?” to “How will you decide?”
It reframes value from activity to autonomy.

The quiet mark of success is not applause, nor extension of contract.
It is the moment when the organisation no longer needs external interpretation — because the capacity now lives within it.

Closing Thoughts

Internal coaching and consulting functions succeed or fail on clarity:

• Clarity of purpose
• Clarity of offerings
• Clarity of abilities
• Clarity of demand qualification
• Clarity of delivery and value

Treat the function as a strategic investment.
Control the narrative. Demonstrate outcomes. Build internal demand deliberately.

Your team is a cost — until the value you release becomes undeniable.

Studio Downloads

For Studio members, three practical resources accompany this essay and translate principle into application.

First, a Demand Generation and Flow-to-Delivery model, showing how interest becomes engagement and how engagement becomes realised value.

Second, an Example Consultancy Menu, illustrating how a function may articulate its potential interventions for internal orientation and solution composition.

Third, a Capability and Ability Field Guide, providing a method for understanding present strengths, future potential, and the deliberate development of judgement in the individuals who will carry the work forward.

Together, these resources form a working toolkit — not to prescribe action, but to sharpen interpretation and enable thoughtful execution.