Building a coaching culture within Organisations

By: Dr. S. Sabesan

As more and more research points out to the impact of managerial styles on employee engagement, companies are realising that the only way to achieve this is by helping their leaders at all levels become coaching oriented in their dialogues. This means they must acquire the necessary skills. As there is pressure on managers to develop their people from within, there is a demand for them to become internal coaches and envision, enable and empower their employees to reach their true potential. As one generation passes on the baton to the other, there is a huge expectation that those with wisdom will play mentorship roles formally or informally. Therefore, coaching is becoming the predominant style of managing and working together. Similarly, commitment to improving the organisation is embedded in a parallel commitment to improving the people.

This is why more and more organisations are talking about creating a coaching culture. Building a coaching culture holds the potential and promise to achieve strategic objectives and improve the business results of the company.

Put differently, when organisations ask themselves, what kind of a culture they need the most in order to achieve their goals in the next 5 years, most are likely to end up referring to coaching orientation in one form or the other.

We at CFI, are witness to a huge interest being shown by many of our clients in creating a coaching culture within their organisations. While these organisations provide a range of development inputs and feedback opportunities to their employees, they believe strongly that unless there is a culture of coaching among those responsible for leadership development, they will not achieve their goals. Therefore, they feel the need to embed a coaching culture into the organisation’s ecosystem.

This means that organisations need to integrate coaching into their talent management processes such as selection, staffing and succession which ensures that people who are hired, promoted and retained are role models for the emerging coaching culture.

 What does a coaching culture bring to the organisation ?

 A coaching culture would result in following specific outcomes to the organisation:

• Leaders could pro-actively contribute to the development of others by being coaching oriented in their conversations.
• People will be able to change roles rapidly as business needs change.
• People will challenge and support their colleagues mutually and live up to the best they are capable of becoming.
• Knowledge will be widely shared and utilised.
• Decision making will become participative.
• A climate of trust and openness will permeate the organisation.
• Learning and development will be viewed as top priority.
• Increased employee engagement, enhanced job satisfaction and morale and greater collaboration among team members will be visible.
• The organisation will be able to reach the market position it deserves rather than where it is today.

How to bring about coaching culture ?

CFI helps address this need by providing the right process frameworks, the skills and guidance.

At the most basic level, all leaders need skills to have powerful conversations, conversations that are full of empathy, attunement, challenge and encouragement. Our programs lay a significant emphasis on skills using the Gerard Egan Skilled Helper model.

Leaders also need the help of a set of processes and guidelines to engage in coaching conversations that lead to meaningful outcomes. CFI has evolved a detailed three stage coaching process which provides coaches with scaffolding to navigate their way through a coaching relationship.

Finally, the organisation itself needs to put in place a sound framework to integrate all its efforts to create a coaching culture. CFI helps create awareness among potential coaches and coachees. In addition to ensuring that the supervising managers are fully involved in the coaching process, CFI also puts in place a supervisory system to ensure that professional standards are adhered to.

To make such an impact at the cultural level, the active involvement of the CEO is critical. It certainly helps if the CEO himself or herself has experienced the benefits of coaching firsthand.

If coaching has to make a significant business impact and has to become a movement like the quality movements and so on, the change must happen at a cultural level.

Dr. S. Sabesan is Director, Programs and Research at Executive and Business Coaching Foundation India Limited.