Why Your Company Should Embrace a Coaching Culture

Coaching is about improving human capacity to deliver superior results. By adopting a coaching culture within your organization, you drive performance improvement and realize a heightened sense of shared vision among every member of your workforce.

In a recent survey, more than 1,300 executives were asked how their companies viewed coaching. The results overwhelmingly supported its value.

• Forty percent of respondents said coaching was a desirable skill for leaders.
• Twenty percent of companies required coaching as a core leadership competency.
• Thirty percent viewed it as a core competency across the entire enterprise.

While effective one-on-one coaching helps increase retention, performance and overall results, a true coaching culture expands this advantage. It impacts the entire company and energizes all employees from top to bottom and laterally.

What a Coaching Culture Looks Like

A company that adopts a coaching culture has the potential to move its entire workforce toward peak performance. It’s an evolutionary process and when you get there, you probably won’t even define it as such. Coaching will become second nature – the manner in which all employees communicate, problem solve and innovate on a daily basis.

• The success of each person is exponentially multiplied. Employees at all levels accept ownership and accountability for their product and their relationships with co-workers and customers. Less daily management supervision is required as employees develop their skills and move toward their full potential.
• In another research study, organizations that effectively prepared managers to coach were 130 percent more likely to realize stronger results. Thirty-nine percent achieved stronger employee results as measured by engagement, productivity and customer service outcomes.

A coaching culture enhances:

• Strategy: Employees develop a “solutions” approach to their tasks and responsibilities. Every individual can clearly see the relevance of their goals to the company’s strategic plan.
• People performance: Leaders inherently bring out the best in people and employees increasingly engage in critical thinking. Commitments to personal and professional performance goals are enhanced and barriers are broken down. Everyone’s passion, drive and ambitions are in alignment, thus energizing the entire organization.
• Knowledge management: Today’s businesses are challenged to successfully manage knowledge as multiple generations interact. A coaching culture boosts the transfer of critical business capabilities and the refinement of workforce skills. New solutions are tested in an open, contributory environment and every employee receives validation of their expertise.

How to Get There

A coaching culture can provide you a distinct competitive and talent development advantage. But you have to be all in. You can’t pick up a coaching culture and then subsequently lay it down. It’s what you and all your employees do 24/7. And it’s well worth it!

• Deeply involve every employee in your vision and its pursuit. Members of Generations X and Y are now your dominant workforce population segments. They’ve grown up with continuous learning, feedback and transparency, and they expect nothing less from their employers.
• Both young talent and seasoned veterans benefit from a coaching culture that supports values. However, it’s not soft. Accountability is a core principle.

Progress toward a true coaching culture is realized incrementally through a range of activities:

• On/off coaching: At this stage, individual engagements are under way at various points around the company. Initiatives are usually a mix of developmental and remedial programs and often, they are self-generated. Adding structure to this model through the central management of coaches will help you gain greater control and benefit from your investment.
• A coaching framework: Coaching is woven into your current leadership development initiatives by embedding a few hours in after certain programs. Consider developing those with an interest and capability to serve as peer coaches.
• Integrated coaching: A cadre of internal coaches is deployed throughout the company. They challenge employees to think differently and expand their views of both problems and solutions. This is a quantum leap into a culture where coaching-based values become part of your organizational DNA.

Where does your company stand on the coaching culture spectrum? Where would you like to be? Your executive consultant at BrainWorks can help develop the direction and plan you need to realize your goal. Contact us today to learn more.