The term “coaching culture” has become a buzzword in many organizations, often thrown around without a holistic plan for execution. Many executives accustomed to more structured work practices are skeptical of an approach towards people management that encourages freedom to experiment. Most executives prioritize measurable and immediate outcomes since traditional work approaches involve performance metrics, and they often expect to see immediate quantifiable results.
Likewise, when executives undertake any new initiatives, they are often under pressure to maximize return on investment (ROI). While a coaching culture is beneficial to the organization in the long run, it may not have an easily quantifiable ROI, making it challenging for executives to justify investing in this initiative to stakeholders.
However, developing a well-developed coaching culture can result in a radical transformation in your organization. A 2019 study by the International Coach Federation polling 900 talent management professionals and industry leaders found that organizations with a coaching culture outperform their counterparts in profitability, productivity, change management, customer satisfaction, and compliance.
Fostering a coaching culture within an organization requires deliberate effort and strategic planning. It’s a combination of individual behaviors, organizational strategy, and leadership commitment. The ICF study also reported that a hallmark of a strong coaching culture is when the organization uses three coaching modalities:
External Coach Practitioners
Internal Coach Practitioners
Management using coaching skills
External coach practitioners bring in fresh perspectives and provide expert insight, while internal entities, including managers, provide support and guidance within the company.
Is Coaching the Same as Mentoring or Sponsoring?
While discussing coaching and mentoring under the same umbrella is okay, we shouldn’t use the two terms interchangeably. A mentor shares their skill or knowledge. Meanwhile, a coach guides. A sponsor actively advocates for you. It’s someone who recommends your name for high-stake assignments to help you win promotions and get noticed in the organization. Sponsors use their political capital for an employee’s good. Simply put, mentors and coaches offer advice, guidance, and feedback, while sponsors leverage their influence to open doors for an employee’s growth.
Mentoring has more to do with instructing, offering suggestions, giving advice, and telling, whereas coaching focuses on raising awareness, providing feedback, and reflecting. Due to its directive approach, mentoring is often long-term, with some relationships lasting for months or even lifelong.
Coaching can be as short-term as a 10-minute conversation or a weekly reflection session. It’s also non-directive in nature, which means the coach provides confidence, trust, and space for the worker to perform. That’s opposed to mentoring, where the mentee learns a skill or knowledge from the mentor.
The good news is both can work in tandem. In fact, they’re mutually inclusive. However, that doesn’t mean having one negates the need for the other. An organization that runs mentorship programs can still lack a coaching culture. So, you must pursue both to create a growth-oriented environment in your company.
While mentoring and coaching have to do with “doing,” sponsoring has to do with “speaking” on someone’s behalf. Think of it this way. A mentor would speak with an employee, offering guidance, advice, and sharing their expertise to support the employee’s professional growth, whereas a coach would speak to the individual, helping them identify their strengths and weaknesses so that they can improve their professional performance accordingly. Sponsors assist employees a bit differently by advocating for them or endorsing their abilities and potential to key decision-makers and senior leaders in the organization. In their own ways, all three of these leaders pave the way for opportunities and progress in the workplace.
A workplace has a successful coaching culture when everyone consistently embodies a coach-like approach, displaying qualities such as active listening, mindfulness, and a genuine desire to empower and support others in their professional growth and development. In such an organization, leaders create a psychologically safe environment for their employees to grow and learn, allowing them to achieve maximum engagement and productivity.
Coaching can feel awkward at first because people managers are asking their employees to be vulnerable even though we may not have fully established a solid foundation of trust. It is important that the employee feels like we are meeting them at their level of vulnerability so that going forward, they know we are always willing to talk the talk. Leaders need to learn to become more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.
The following approaches can help you sow the seeds of a coaching culture in your company.
Create a Learning Environment
The essence of a coaching culture lies in fostering a continuous learning mindset, which is best achieved by encouraging individuals to explore and embrace different working methods. It is important to remember that experimentation has its risks. A continuous learning mindset encompasses an organization’s commitment to ongoing learning and improvement. Fueled by characteristics like openness to feedback, self-reflection, adaptability, and curiosity, such a mindset allows organizations and individuals to embrace a proactive attitude toward acquiring new skills and knowledge. Besides facilitating personal growth and professional development, it also results in organizational success.
Don’t let the fear of failure restrict you from yielding the benefits of finding new and better ways of working. Failure often allows you to examine what worked or what didn’t, even more so than success. It can foster your critical and analytical thinking skills, allowing you to innovate, redirect and try another way to execute something the next time. More and more organizations have embraced this point of view, coming to understand what innovators have always known: that failure is a prerequisite to invention. A business can’t develop a breakthrough product or process if it’s not willing to encourage risk-taking and learn from subsequent mistakes. Let experimentation remain a cornerstone of your team’s culture by encouraging everyone to come up with new ideas.
“There is absolutely no innovation without failure.” Brene Brown
Creating a learning environment and building team trust takes time. It’s much easier for managers to say, “Let me show you how to do this” or “This is how I want you to do XYZ task,” but letting employees take their own path toward the desired outcome can be powerful, but requires a certain degree of trust. Invite employees to ask questions, reward curiosity, give feedback, and create an environment where people are comfortable taking risks.
“There’s no team without trust.” — Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google
Be actively involved in your employee’s career advancement and learning process. The 2018 Workplace Learning Report found that 94% of employees would stay at their current workplace longer if their employers were invested in their careers. Likewise, 56% of employees say they would take a professional development course their manager suggested. It’s important for managers to get involved with career planning so that they can guide their subordinates in their learning goals..
Teach Key Leaders Coaching Conversation Skills
The key to coaching successful communication is to approach it from a place of support, collaboration, and positivity. You have to get into the conversation focusing on the bigger picture. Create a judgment-free zone for your workers, and don’t let individual reactions deter from the conversation at hand.
In his book The Five Coaching Conversations, John Gates explains five types of coaching conversations; Elevating, Empowering, Encouraging, Exploring, and Explaining. All these conversations are equally important, depending on the scenario.
Personalized feedback and training are even more important in today’s organizations since they resonate most with Gen Z and millennials, the two groups making up the majority of the current workforce. These generations expect specific action plans and individual feedback to enhance their performance.
Providing clear action plans and individual feedback can reduce ambiguity and uncertainty in the workplace. It helps alleviate work-related stress by providing a roadmap for success and enabling individuals to navigate challenges more confidently and clearly.
Investing in coaching training for key leaders is imperative for organizations to enhance leadership effectiveness and foster a culture of continuous improvement. By beginning at the highest levels, coaching skills can cascade throughout the organization, flowing from C-suite executives to HR professionals, managers, the workforce, and new employees.
Elevate Your Best People
Lionel Messi or Michael Jordan wouldn’t have reached their G.O.A.T. status if their coaches hadn’t seen their potential and spent extra time and effort on them. The same rule applies to the corporate environment.
Creating a coaching culture means you must elevate your top talent. Those who may be struggling should be helped with mentorship, training, and any other resources they need. Be forewarned this might require some difficult conversations, but they will all pay off.
Manager elevation and training are possibly the most important for three reasons. One — they are the link between the C-suite and the workforce. Two — 82% of the workers would consider quitting due to a bad manager. And three — employees with good managers are likely to perform better and be more engaged.
Don’t overlook the middle managers and upper-level management in your coaching efforts. They’re just as instrumental to the organization’s success — if not more — as the lower-tier employees. Middle managers oversee and operate the day-to-day actions that drive an organization. They coordinate resources and mobilize operations to adopt new processes and practices and foster innovative ways of working, all while ensuring optimal employee performance and productivity.
The key is to make room for efficient communication since the managers are on the frontlines, engaging with employees daily. They should know about any new approach or resource the employees can use to improve their everyday tasks.
If you’re planning a significant change in the organization, open up the channels of communication to ensure the managers are in the loop. For example, create a Slack channel where managers can raise questions. You can also conduct a Q&A session to provide them with the necessary knowledge to effectively communicate the directions of organizational change to their team members.
Beyond creating communication channels, listening to the managers’ feedback and concerns is crucial. Address their issues and incorporate their suggestions in your change management strategy. By acknowledging the managers’ input, you will foster their sense of ownership, which will empower them to positively impact the organization’s culture and change strategy.
“One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what others have to say.’’ — Bryant H. McGill
There’s a widespread consensus among practitioners and professional experts that open communication helps facilitate planned change, which is any deliberate and intentional effort to bring about a desired transformation or improvement in an organization, system, process, or individual behavior. The empirical landscape also strongly supports the connection between communication and organizational change. Communication in the workplace is also positively correlated to organizational outputs, including job satisfaction, commitment, and performance. On the contrary, poor or ineffective communication results in low trust levels, job dissatisfaction, employee stress, and significant friction in the change process.
Lead Organizational Change With Empathy
In his MIT commencement address, Tim Cook told graduates that people will try to convince them to remove empathy from their careers, but they should not fall for this “false premise.’’ The CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world shares this belief with 80% of CEOs, who said they recognize empathy to be important for success in the 2023 State of Workplace Empathy report.
Empathetic organizations are proven to be less stressful, have higher morale, and experience stronger collaborations. Recent studies also show that empathetic listening in the workplace can allow organizations to better understand their challenges and create tangible initiatives to promote desired cultural values. Effective organizational leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping employee performance. Leaders’ empathic attitudes and dispositions have the potential to significantly impact various organizational functions, such as work culture, resource accessibility, peer support, and work design, ultimately leading to improved performance.
“Without empathy it is not possible to get the best from your team, so for this reason it is the key to everything.” — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
Meaningful conversations educate employees about organizational change, motivating them to support new strategies and approaches. When an organization undergoes significant change, there’s a lot of planning and activity. Since most employees are not directly involved in this process, uncertainty and rumors become commonplace. Communication at this stage helps reduce uncertainty by informing employees about changes and how their roles will differ with regard to new strategies. Most importantly, these conversations dispel rumors and uncertainty in the organization.
When bringing about a major change in your organization, it’s imperative to consider how your employees will feel about it. The way you share this information matters more than what you share. When such major conversations lack empathy, organizational transformation becomes difficult. Being a company leader who wants to undertake successful organizational change, you must ensure your employees are onboard and well-informed about the overall change and how it will affect them.
Conduct Audience Profiling at Every Stage
Creating personas of groups or audiences affected by the change initiative in the organization is an integral part of change management. However, it’s equally imperative to remember that your audience’s preferences and needs might evolve throughout the change trajectory. Therefore, you must reevaluate the audience profiles at every step.
First, you need to create personas for key employee segments based on their function and level of involvement in business processes. Interview your employees in these segments to get an insight into their mindsets. The interview questions should revolve around feelings, concerns, beliefs, and questions about the organization’s existing strategy. Also, ask them about any changes they wanted or did not want the top management to make.
These interviews would help you understand the response of each employee segment to the change initiative. Then, you can create employee communication based on how each segment feels about the change. Are they excited? Frustrated? Frightened? An example of tailored conversation would be urging excited employees to influence their frightened or reluctant peers.
You cannot have a blanket view of the whole organization. Instead, you need to cater to each segment’s concerns and feelings differently. Also, you cannot stick to answers from one interview alone. You must repeat this process to gauge how your employees feel over time. Then, tailor communication at each stage according to any changes in their feelings, concerns, and questions.
Understandably, you’d want to keep some things private during the change process. But the rule of thumb is that the more informed people are, the better equipped they are to deal with the discomfort that comes with change. The key is to listen and acknowledge your employees’ fears and communicate accordingly.
“Real Communication is impossible without listening.” — Lisa Sanders-Nakahara
Use Radical CANDOR
Radical CANDOR (Caring Personally while Challenging Directly) is an “antidote to toxic company culture” since it teaches you to communicate with your employees while caring for them on a personal level.
When uncertainty prevails in an organization, many leaders do not share everything with their employees to prevent stress and panic. However, this approach leads to distrust and a lack of transparency. Instead, use CANDOR to communicate with your employees in a sincere, clear, and transparent manner.
By sharing pertinent information honestly and openly, you can cultivate a culture of trust and collaboration, enabling employees to navigate uncertainty with confidence. Follow this approach in your change initiatives to ensure your employees feel cared for but are also well-informed about the fact that the organization will undergo changes, and they will have to find a way to incorporate them into their daily work.
Impact of a Coaching Culture
Admittedly, it’s not always rainbows, butterflies, and sunshine. When taking new approaches, there will be hurdles in cultivating a company-wide coaching culture that will include some trial and error. Employees may be reluctant to accept change, but you can overcome this with a comprehensive communication plan.
I always emphasize that ‘’mentorship is more than just having a formal set time to meet or a lunch every month.’’ It’s more to do with having someone inspirational in your organization who invests in your growth and success — someone who is willing to collaborate with you and present you with opportunities to go further in your career. As an organizational leader, it’s your responsibility to develop a coaching culture within your capacity. Be inclusive across situations, geographies, and teams. You must connect your colleagues with the right opportunities to grow, mentoring, coaching, or sponsoring them — whatever the need may be.
