Coaching is not limited to Executives or Limited to companies that want to use it for specific purposes. We can take the most of the Coaching if we integrate it in our company’s DNA, using it as part of our culture, independently of our dimension.
But what does Coaching Culture mean? In a quite simple way, it is about supporting your employees so that they learn new skills and become greater assets for your company. And because of implementing a Coaching Culture you will have higher probabilities to drive your business to success. Success that we can translate in 3 main benefits:
1. Higher Employees Engagement
When a team is engaged, the levels of productivity, creativity and retention are higher. The real challenge is to do it sustainably, and a Coaching Culture can be a strong contributor for that.
2. A Healthier Management Style
A Coaching Culture fosters a stronger bond between work colleagues and at the same time better working relationships. A more valued and engaged employees has direct impacts on business.
3. Superior Business Results
Coaching Culture improves skill development, creates better leaders, and impacts the business results: aligned strategy, people performance, and consequently a better business performance.
Benefits are clear, and most of the organizations that have been investing in creating a Coaching Culture recognize that today they cannot live without it. So, if you have in mind to start with this transformational journey, which steps should you follow?
1. Assessment
The first thing we need to do it is to understand what your company needs are, to prepare a plan embedding by Coaching Culture that allow you to maximize your opportunities & strengths.
2. Select the Right Coach/es
It is important to choose a Coach with recognized credentials, and that can demonstrate his/her experience in company contexts. Even if the Coach has lived through his/her own experience similar processes could be an additional value, as some situations & steps you found in your transformation journey are most of the time repetitive in several organizations, although never exactly the same.
3. Identify a simple Coaching Model
We need to identify the early adopters and a simple coaching framework, to make sure that everyone is familiar with the approach and understand the language used, as it will help us to overcome the resistance to change of part of the organization.
4. Train internal Coaches
By training internal leaders to coach, you create a more sustainable, and stronger approach to drive change. Because they understand the organization’s culture and interests, internal coaches significantly increase engagement, productivity, and performance among others.
5. Create a Policy
To ensure the development of a coaching culture, a policy review is a must. These policies could include performance reviews, key competencies, rewards system, selection and promotion criteria, etc.
6. Live it
It’s really key to let it flow within the organization. Starting from the top management. How? Some examples:
- Acknowledging, celebrating, and rewarding questions rather than answers.
- Encouraging conversations & active listening.
- Appreciating differences.
7. Measure & Learn
It is key to know how to measure the outcomes of the process. And to assess how well the organization has created the ideal culture and accomplished the desired goals, we should tailor the metrics to your organization. Some examples:
- Progress on organizational and individual goals.
- Changed behaviours: competency development, relationship building.
- Efficiency and time to market.
- Employee satisfaction, customers satisfaction.
And it’s thanks to a continuous follow up of the different metrics that the learning to come out to give us a new perspective when defining our next steps.
Summing up: a Coaching Culture, not only impact specific people topics and concrete company results, but it’s also a deep transformation and it impacts people and organizations in a major scale, being an enabler for creating a better environment between organizations and society.
And the steps to implement it are Crystal Clear, so there is no reason to start to implement a Coaching Culture in your Organization (of course adapted at your scale).
Make Coaching a way of Being!
