Get insight into leading diverse teams, and the strengths, values, preferences, and motivations of employees from different generations. Join Dr. Ireland for his session, ‘Leading Diverse Teams’ at PD Nexus: Business and Innovation Insights on Dec. 5. Fills up quickly, register today.
A coaching culture exists when managers and employees are able to engage in candid and respectful conversations that foster self-reflective ideas about how to improve performance. Fostering a coaching culture supports continuous learning, facilitates effective cultural and organizational change, improves the engagement and empowerment of employees, and supports attainment of core business strategies.
In today’s working environment - which can comprise up to five generations representing different values, communication styles, and priorities - a coaching culture can also facilitate inter-generational learning and knowledge transfer. When a coaching framework is followed through to the end, a coaching culture, and coaching, will become embedded within the organization over time, and survive the turbulence of the constantly changing world we work in. You can build a coaching culture using the ten-step framework below.
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Identify your ‘why’: A coaching culture is a means to an end, so begin with clearly defining the technical and behavioural outcomes you want to achieve. Be specific, realistic and timely, with an emphasis on defining who needs to be engaged to succeed in attaining the results. Clearly define in measurable terms how the coaching culture will support the core business strategy. Be clear and unambiguous about the desired outcomes.
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Link to the business strategy: Describe the appropriate organizational culture to achieve your strategy. What is the current organizational culture? For example, the strategy may require high growth, or greater customer focus. Without leaders throughout the organization who can draw out the best performance from their people, high growth or greater customer focus will not be sustainable. So, set up a group of people from across functions and departments and at different levels in the organization, to elicit what is working and what is not working in the current culture, and what needs to be developed.
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Identify internal sponsors: Sponsors act as champions to develop the coaching culture. Consult with your leaders and employees to describe how they themselves will foster the culture they want for the organization, so that the initiative becomes demand led. Ideally, one of the senior managers will head up the sponsor team. An effective sponsor will be someone who has experienced coaching first-hand and can see the benefits for the wider organization.
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Integrate coaching into leadership development initiatives: External coaches can help support the work of the organization’s leadership development teams and facilitators/trainers, ensuring a well-integrated approach so that a coaching mindset can be adopted. Starting at the top of the organization sends a strong message across the enterprise and assists in addressing any preconceptions. These individuals will become role models and implementers of best practices.
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Create a pool of internal coaches: Although senior management teams may benefit best from having an external coach, internal manager-coaches are invaluable in promoting the coaching culture. They will ensure that meetings with employees, team meetings, and performance reviews conform to the organization’s coaching methodology and approach. Remember to define the quality criteria and standards the organization requires of their internal coaches.
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Include coaching in processes and metrics: Coaching should become part of each leader’s/manager’s roles and responsibilities, as well as be part of job descriptions, selection and promotion criteria, leadership and management capabilities, as well as integral to the performance review process.
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Examine how a coaching approach can be implemented by all staff: Coaching skills are useful to engage customers, encourage effective partnerships, and develop cross-functional and cross-departmental teams.
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Develop evaluation strategies: Planning is essential; it is not sufficient to announce the culture change program, provide information, and assume the change will take place. Be clear about the goals. Examine the costs and benefits, and anticipate and plan for resistance. Measures of return on expectations and ROI are critical to ensure support from the senior management team. The investment in coaching has to be put into perspective in relation to the outcome desired, or, as the saying goes, “If you think coaching is expensive, try incompetence.”
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Communicate: Coaching and its benefits need to be communicated actively throughout the organization; examples include intranet postings, video messages from the sponsors about how coaching has helped them, and placing coaching the agenda for quarterly meetings where a coach and coachee talk about their work. With the pool of coaches, regular quarterly meetings with internal and external coaches are a good idea, to share information and create a joint learning culture. The organization can bring them up-to-speed about any recent developments, e.g., modifications to the strategy, demands and expectations of senior management team, or new initiatives. The coaches can share latest developments and examples of best practice. Ground rules for confidentiality need to be underlined and maintained.
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Evaluate and review: Check back with the desired outcomes espoused. Has the strategy produced the coaching culture desired and contributed to the achievement of the business goals? The sponsors at all levels in the organization, senior leaders and managers, and internal and external coaches, should be involved in any evaluation and review.
Dr. Shawn Ireland, Ph.D is a founding partner and managing director of HRCgroup, Inc. He works extensively with Fortune 500 companies, foreign governments and international aid agencies. His expertise includes fostering critical thinking, strategic change, virtual teamwork, and managing human behaviour. He is Program Director and Core Faculty member of the Master of Arts in Industrial and Organizational Psychology programs at Adler University in Vancouver.
Originally published in hrc-group.com.
