The Coaching Culture

A coaching culture is the cornerstone for organisations and their managers being effective and attaining high performance, regardless of industry. Executives and managers that adopt a coaching approach are able to delegate with a high level of confidence. Build high performance teams, continually develop their people as well as defining their leadership style, which not only motivates but also creates loyalty.

A coaching culture approach may seem time consuming and focused on low worth activities. Yet the coaching culture enable those leaders who embrace it to have more time to focus on high value and highly important tasks as they are confident in their delegation and team. There is also a sense of openness and importantly clear boundaries, the coaching culture creates the fine balance between stretching skills and performance and supporting people to develop. This safe environment is not only engaging and stimulating for those involved, it also provides personal and organisational growth.

Clear benefits include, retention of staff, high performance of staff and the business, clear focus on goal achievement, solution focused approach, high levels of trust, strategic organisational development, work satisfaction, loyalty, high level of skill set, personal development.

What does a coaching culture look like?

• Personal growth for executives, mangers and staff
• Open environment for giving and accepting feedback
• People actively seek feedback
• Solution focused approached
• People learn from both positive and negative situations
• Critical debate is encouraged
• Coaching is seen as part of everyday life
• People are encouraged to think and find their own solutions
• Support is available when someone is stretching themselves
• Everyone sees it as their responsibility to use a coaching approach
• Everyone is responsible for their own performance

How can a coaching culture be created?

• Creating a contract for coaching within the organisation
• Ensuring that executives and managers have key coaching skills
• Creating coaching experts to ensure that skills are continually sharpened
• Situational reviews, where a designated coach takes the team through real life cases and open discussion, feedback and debate is generated with clear improvement outcomes
• Clear responsibility charter for all staff
• Positive recognition for both coaching approach and skills development
• Encouraging feedback
• Supplying team with skills for delivering and accepting feedback
• Executives and managers lead by example
• Focus on coaching behaviours both formally and informally
• Creating space for people to try new skills and approaches

A coaching culture supports an autonomous approach to where people can be potent in actions and behaviours. It reduces the potential for games to be played that divert energy away from the tasks and performance requirements.

So how do you know if a coaching culture approach will work for you?

The first step to have a coaching session and to understand its impact as a recipient. Following this is to start the process of building your coaching skills and to start communicating the new process to the team. One of the key elements of this approach is communication and it encourages communication in all directions.

This article provides a brief view of how a coaching culture can work and also the benefits of an approach. There are also other facets to the approach, which will be highlighted in future articles