No matter the industry or the challenge, all our clients are looking for those elusive moves that will strengthen their organization, make them more resilient and innovative, and improve employee engagement. There is no shortage of ideas and programs in the marketplace, so it’s important to look for ideas that work and that will be a fit for your company and your people.
Increasingly, we see our clients who are heads of human resources, organizational development and talent management moving from providing sporadic, one-on-one coaching of top-level executives to an overall coaching culture. It’s a massive undertaking that requires dedication at all levels of the organization, so be sure you know what you’re getting into and what you hope to achieve.
As we consider the need for greater agility in solving problems, coaching supports this through conversations that expand current thinking and challenge team members to explore what’s possible and what partnerships can be created.
With the right process and the energy to carry it through, the rewards for systematically developing a culture where coaching is part of everyday relationships can transform not only the performance but the value creation of the organization.
One of our clients, in a national retail organization, is intent on developing a coaching culture in order to support leaders in times of continual change, develop the potential of identified talent, and develop leadership capability. To do this, they built a strong bench of internal and external coaches to coach leaders, as well as created a coaching skills workshop for leaders to develop their own coaching skills.
The impact has been tremendous so far. Leaders are using their coaching skills to lead their teams and early results are showing increases in performance and engagement. Leaders are also feeling more confident in using a coaching style as their leadership style.
Building on the work of Peter Hawkins in his book, Creating a Coaching Culture, there are seven steps in the process of moving toward a coaching culture, and they fit into three distinct categories:
Coaching Strategy, Leadership And Organizational Culture Change
Step 1: Create a coaching strategy, and align it to the business goals and wider organizational culture change.
Step 2: Ensure the organization’s leaders actively support coaching and align their engagement to the organizational culture change.
Learning And Skill Development
Step 3: Develop an effective bench of external and internal coaches.
Step 4: Move coaching beyond individual coaching sessions and harvest organizational learning.
Step 5: Shift coaching to become the predominant management style and how an organization does business with all its stakeholders.
Systems And Structure
Step 6: Embed coaching in HR and performance management processes.
Step 7: Embed evaluation at each step of the coaching culture journey.
The first step in creating a coaching culture is to create a coaching strategy. This strategy must be aligned to the organizational focus — including its purpose, values, vision and business strategy —and to other organizational, team and individual development initiatives. The coaching strategy will clearly outline the who, what, where, when and why of coaching in the organization.
It’s important that the coaching strategy is constantly connected to other organizational change programs and to the mission and overall strategy to avoid the danger of being viewed as the "flavor of the month." For coaching to truly become entrenched, the coaching strategy should be able to show how it’s enabling the organization to achieve its goals and how coaching as a process is aligned with how the organization needs to function in order to succeed. And you can’t forget culture because if you do, your transformation efforts will likely fail.
If you don’t already have a coaching strategy, the first question must be: is there energy to develop one? Do your senior leaders support building culture, and will they be fierce endorsers? Are they willing to play a prominent role? Chief executives, senior executives and, in particular, HR executives are critical players in making the change from being an organization that provides coaching to an organization with a coaching culture. This means turning managers and leaders into coach leaders who coach their own staff.
It’s certainly helpful to hear the chief executive and senior leaders speak to how important coaching is to the organization and the difference it will make to improving the organization. But what's more impactful is these senior leaders telling personal stories about their own experiences of coaching and how it helped them. In addition, using a coaching style of engaging staff will help embed it in the culture and will allow staff to see the CEO and the senior team as the ultimate coaches who support the efforts being made all the way down in the organization.
If your organization doesn’t have the energy or desire to undertake the complete cultural overhaul required, it doesn’t mean you can’t get more out of your coaching efforts. In my next post, we'll discuss how to leverage the managers in your organization to become coaching champions for their employees and peers. We’ll focus more in-depth on the aspects of learning, skills development, systems and structures, and on how to find a middle ground between individualized coaching and moving to a complete coaching culture.
