Establishing Coaching Culture in the Organisation

Article by Dr. Rajesh Mohan Rai, Business Coach, Executive Coach & HR Strategist\

Timothy Gallwey defines “Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn, rather than teaching them.”   

What is the coaching culture? What are its benefits, and how can leaders establish coaching culture?

Coaching culture can best be described as an environment in which leaders encourage employees to develop their skills, through feedback, encouragement and support. An organization built upon such culture values training, feedback, and it provides employees with well-communicated opportunities to advance their careers and achieve the desired personal and professional results.

Leaders can make the best investment in people by instilling a coaching culture in their organizations, the in-house nurturing of talent and growth of capabilities for the employees at large.

At the heart of every organization is its culture—its character and distinctiveness. Today, people are putting more importance on company culture than ever before. Deloitte recently found that 94% of executives and 88% of employees consider a distinct organization’s culture important to organizational success.

While organizations are investing time, money and efforts in coaching, hoping it will seep into their culture and drive productivity and engagement, a lot of them aren’t seeing the desired results. The disconnect? Culture.

Coaching ensures that the potential for growth does not go unrealized. 

There are many far-reaching benefits of coaching culture.

• Employees developed under coaching culture are great assets for their organizations. Coaching is the most effective way to prepare today’s high potential employees to future leaders.
• The workforce, as a whole, becomes more energized, empowered, engaged, and willing to go that extra mile for the greater good of the organization.
• Coaching culture motivates employees by giving them the means and opportunities to improve their skills. It rewards creativity and creates a more satisfying work environment.

For coaching culture to work and truly drive results for the business, it must resonate throughout the entire organization—at every level, in every function/ department in every conversation.   The leader s in organizations can develop a coaching culture following the below steps:

Lead from the Front: If coaching has to become the organization’s culture, it must start with the leaders. Organizations with healthy coaching cultures are more likely to have senior leaders involved in the coaching process Leaders have to ensure it becomes part of every meeting agenda and strategic discussion. They must illustrate the benefits of coaching—to the organization and to each individual—by talking about it and, more importantly, by doing it and if you are not the right leader for the job, find the person who is. Make that individual the spokesperson and have him or her share enthusiasm regularly.

As senior leaders take the lead, employees will naturally follow. However, to make coaching fully relevant to them, identify their motivation. Help managers, as well as employees, understand the value that coaching will provide them. Show and make managers understand, how coaching can engage their team members, increase team performance, enhance their leadership skills.

Learning Regularly

Every employee in the organization, regardless of role or level, should understand the basic principles of coaching and performance improvement. Organizations with successful coaching cultures are nearly 40% more likely to target every employee with coaching training than organizations with less pervasive coaching cultures.

Make coaching, training, and development regular opportunities by using classroom or virtual lessons. Then, like anything we want to excel in, it takes hours of practice. The more you coach, the better you become.

Apply the Learning

Where you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You can’t create a coaching culture without developing an action plan and providing support to make the transition easier for employees. Establish a personalized follow-up plan that will work with your organization’s business pulse and structure. Some organizations develop a master coaching class with follow-up small group sessions, others use reporting systems and even online coaching platforms or apps. The point is, create a system that helps everyone apply what one has learned.

Accountability for Results

The beauty of coaching is developing employees who feel supported in their abilities to make decisions and own their choices. An accountability system encourages employees to take ownership of their performance and encourages managers to take ownership of how they coach others?  First, make sure every employee at every level is experiencing coaching conversations on a regular basis. Second, establish transparency regarding coaching efforts in your organizations. Do you know who is coaching successfully? How many coaching conversations are occurring? Tapping into this information will guide leadership on what needs to change and how to establish the required coaching culture.

If your organization is already investing time, money and efforts in employee coaching, why stop? Dig deeper, and change the identity of your organization to one that coaches at every level and in every instance. As a result, you can expect better productivity, more engagement, and higher performance all around.