Tag Archives: creating a coaching culture

Making the case for a “coaching culture” in your organisation

Coaching, Developing as a leader,

Today a request (on the Training Journal Daily Digest) for input on how to make the case for creating a coaching culture moved me to write. The person making the request had been charged with making the case by her line manager after suggesting it would benefit her employing organisation. Given the level of experience (as best I could judge from a brief posting) I decided to go right back to the fundamentals. This is what I wrote:

There’s plenty I could say on this subject – creating a coaching culture across organisations (also known as a “high performance culture”) is close to my heart and to my professional interests. First though, I thought I’d suggest you get really clear about the outcomes you desire from preparing a business case – and also about the outcomes your manager wants from this activity.

I’m guessing there may be several, including:

  • Making and testing the case for going down this road, i.e. outlining what this might do for your organisation together with credible evidence to support your assertion and testing what it might take to achieve those outcomes. Together, this constitutes your compelling case;
  • Beginning the process of building support and commitment across the organisation for some kind of investment in this;
  • For your manager there may also be other elements which s/he may not express, such as letting you be the person who tests the idea and fails rather than taking on this risk or beginning to coach you in how to build the case and make it stick so that it turns into a viable proposal which achieves great results across the organisation.

These objectives are illustrative – and just to say that if you overlook any one of your key outcomes you may direct energies ineffectively as you set about making your case.

What is a ‘coaching culture’?

Coaching, ,

Sometimes my colleagues ask the most stimulating questions via discussion groups and this one (on the Coaching at Work group on LinkedIn) intrigued me: what is a ‘coaching culture’?

Amongst the many environments I have worked and played in, I think first and foremost of my experience as a member of a number of resource teams with ITS (http://www.itsnlp.com/). In this context, I was a volunteer working with other volunteers to support our trainers in delivering various trainings in neurolinguistic programming (or NLP). As volunteers we were all interested in furthering our learning as well as supporting the learning of others. You could call this a ‘coaching culture’.

What was the culture in this environment? This was an environment in which team members embraced each other fully, understanding that we are all learners. Anyone seeking support for their learning would be welcomed by other members of the team. Whenever there was friction or misunderstandings feedback was given openly and directly, and both parties understood that they might have something to learn from this exchange of feedback. And when team members had a ‘gripe’ with another member of the team it was typically well understood that this was a signal to the ‘griper’ that he or she might have something to learn. Team members tended to view each other – and programme participants – as resourceful, whole and able to learn (even if they hadn’t learnt yet!). There were high levels of trust and flexibility.

What about work in this environment? Whilst there was considerable flexibility and a willingness to cut each other some slack, we still worked to high standards across a whole range of tasks, from sorting the stationery cupboard to supporting participants. Over the life of a team (twenty days over five four-day modules) we got to know each others’ strengths and to work to them as well as to our own. Work was a joyful experience.

How might this translate into the workplace? Correspondents on the Coaching At Work group highlight that organisations aspiring to a ‘coaching culture’ at work might have many definitions of this phrase and as I write I wonder how many definitions would fall well short of the ‘ITS experience’. How many organisations would welcome the level of intimacy involved in working together in this way?

I also wonder which is chicken and which is egg. For, on the surface, it seems to me that the culture of the resource teams was only possible because team members were chosen with great care. At the same time, I think of Douglas McGregor’s famous ‘XY Theory’ which proposed that managers tend to adopt one of two fundamentally different approaches to managing their people. Is it possible that, over time, an organisation in which leaders believe in the importance of learning (who engage in their own learning and support the learning of others) will, over time, attract precisely those employees who wish to work in a ‘coaching culture’?