A coaching culture is a workplace approach in which leaders, managers and employees work together to increase individual, team and company organisational performance. It empowers people at all levels to excel at their tasks and emphasises the importance of learning and development.
In a small business, where team members are often relied upon to perform multiple roles and work more autonomously, a coaching culture can help to empower individuals to reach their highest potential.
Firstly, let’s define what coaching actually is … and what it isn’t.
Coaching is a one-to-one or group interaction to increase individuals’ accountability for their performance and/or development. It is about helping people learn and assisting them to create practical, step-by-step action plans to reach their goals.
It’s not about teaching or telling somebody what to do.
A coaching culture is therefore not an end in itself, it’s a means of achieving other outcomes, such as strong leadership, a desire for organisational learning and individual empowerment.
Here are some of the reasons why you might use coaching in the workplace:
- When you are seeking to develop your employees’ competencies or skills
- When your employees are not meeting expectations in performance
- When a company is undergoing a transition or introducing new systems and processes
- When an employee would benefit from one-to-one direction, as opposed to a group setting in order to achieve effective learning outcomes
Stronger change management capabilities
Research shows that high-performing organisations have stronger change management capabilities and coaching is one of the most helpful ways to develop these capabilities. It also shows that organisations with strong coaching cultures are more likely to have better talent and business outcomes, and success at large-scale.
How to create and sustain a coaching culture
One of the ways a business can instil a coaching culture is for leaders and managers to experience coaching for themselves. That way, employees will follow suit and managers can experience for themselves how coaching empowers and takes skills to a higher level.
Managers can also be trained to coach. This will develop their skills in giving feedback, and teach them how to empower their team to deal with their own problems and help their team to grow professionally.
Command and control style leadership is no longer effective in this fast-paced world. Employees and their managers need to be agile and respond to changing conditions on a moment by moment basis. For this, they need a different type of management. One that empowers and facilitates and leads to change. This is what a coaching culture is all about.
If you would like help implementing a coaching culture in your workplace, Kirsty Craig Associates has the skills and experience to help. We provide one-to-one management coaching, as well as masterclasses that will help your management team to coach themselves.
