Coaching is a tool to improve both individual and team performance. It offers tailored personalised support to managers to help them achieve business and career goals. Good managers create organisational cultures that foster high staff motivation and commitment to work roles - in turn leading to more relevant and sensitive customer services.
Creating a coaching culture that is embedded demonstrates a learning organisation that places much emphasis on staff development. This article sets out a six-point plan for putting in place a coaching culture.
There are high expectations of managers to succeed in their leadership roles, especially in managing fast-changing agendas and in increasingly competitive markets. Many organisations now offer formal coaching for individuals to assist them in achieving organisational and career goals. This article explains the next step: developing a culture of coaching throughout the organisation so that coaching behaviours form part of every role that involves supporting and influencing others.
What is a coaching culture?
The 2005 Annual Training and Development Survey from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development [CIPD] revealed that 88% of organisations are now using managers as coaches in some form or other. However, it is clear from this survey that not all of those organisations fully understand what they mean by coaching.
The CIPD offers this broadly accepted definition of coaching: “Developing a person's skills and knowledge so that their job performance improves, hopefully leading to the achievement of organisational objectives. It targets high performance and improvement at work, although it may also have an impact on an individual's private life. It usually lasts for a short period and focuses on specific skills and goals.”
A coaching culture within an organisation is a culture where not only formal coaching occurs but also where most people use coaching behaviours as a means of managing, influencing and communicating with each other.
Why do it?
To many, all this talk of coaching cultures and systemic perspectives will seem far removed from the practical reality of their working lives. However, the CIPD's survey revealed that those sceptics are increasingly in a minority. 80% of respondents agreed that coaching will only work well in a culture that supports learning and development.
Furthermore, there is considerable academic support for the view that developing a coaching culture can yield significant organisational benefits. In a 2004 Harvard Business Review article, Sherman and Freas argued the case for a coaching culture in this way: “When you create a culture of coaching, the result may not be directly measurable in dollars. But we have yet to find a company that can't benefit from more candour, less denial, richer communication, conscious development of talent, and disciplined leaders who show compassion for people.”
A coaching culture promotes more open communication. It builds trust and respect. It improves working relationships by showing how everyone can bring something to the party. In too many organisations, coaching is seen as a remedial activity. By firmly embedding it in the culture of an organisation you can begin to use it as a development tool where everyone can recognise that part of their role involves facilitating the development of others. This, in turn, can bring significant operational improvements.
How to do it?
Recent research by the CIPD suggests that 99% of managers believe in coaching as a tool for organisational and personal improvement and would like to develop a coaching culture in their organisation. Fiona Eldridge, head of leadership and coaching at Veredus, also believes that achieving a coaching culture is more easily said than done. This six-point plan should help readers steer clear of the more common pitfalls:
- Link it to the business strategy. The first step must always be to understand the organisation’s future direction and then clarify exactly how coaching can play a part in that. For instance, if a public body is seeking to improve its audited assessment rating then you need to demonstrate that working on individual effectiveness will have a cumulative effect on the performance of the whole organisation. Coaching cannot exist in isolation.
- Find a champion. Few innovative initiatives succeed without the support of a senior executive committed to the idea. Ideally this will be someone on the board, or an executive director, who has themself been coached and has more than a theoretical understanding of the potential benefits.
- Start at the top and sell the benefits. The first people to receive coaching should be the board, simply because once they have discovered its uses they will be keen to see it cascade throughout the rest of the organisation. Be prepared, however, to sell the benefits. Remember that human resources jargon may not impress them, so talk in terms of business benefits. For example, show how a competitor company increased sales after coaching the business development team.
- Develop a clear coaching methodology. If it is to become an accepted part of the organisational fabric, coaching must demonstrate clear outcomes. It should be related to actual projects and issues, not only theoretical ones. Both coach and participant must agree clear success criteria, and there must be a process where feedback is provided as a matter of course.
- Communicate clearly. Introducing a coaching culture is a major change for any organisation and there is always the likelihood of resistance to any change. This resistance can be dealt with by communicating to all employees exactly what is happening, why, and what the intended outcomes are.
- Embed the process. Coaching modules should be included in the management induction programme. Once the senior management have honed their coaching skills they should be encouraged to coach their own teams and in this way coaching will cascade down through the organisation.
How it can work
For about two years I was involved with a generics pharmaceutical business. It was a family firm that had been taken over by a multi-national and they brought me in to work with the leadership team. They needed to improve their communications skills in order to work more effectively together, and so asked me to help direct their effort. My work involved coaching the management team as well as individuals - helping them to understand the different ways in which people communicate and encouraging them to interact in person, rather than posting messages on the company intranet. They’ve now become competent coaches themselves and have started passing on this learning to their teams. The company is well on its way to developing a coaching culture and is seeing the benefits on its bottom line.
Taking the first step
One of the first steps to introducing an organisation-wide coaching culture is to increase the acceptance of coaching by offering it to key individuals. Coaching can offer support to developing management teams as well as established teams who wish to improve their collective performance. It can provide critical support to managers going through organisational change where skills upgrading may be needed or where a redefinition of role is required. Once coaching is accepted it can then be cascaded throughout the organisation by providing training in coaching behaviours.
Veredus is expanding its pool of experienced, trained coaches who have all worked at senior levels in public and private organisations. We are working with organisations to support their change programmes both by coaching individual senior managers and training internal coaches to create coaching cultures.
About the author
Fiona Eldridge is a published coaching author and member of the standards committee of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, Fiona offers this advice on how to develop a coaching culture. She has also designed and delivered programmes on a wide range of leadership initiatives as well as providing individual coaching for senior executives. She holds non-executive director posts with both public- and private-sector organisations.