Coaching has become a popular formula for leadership development in organizations and it is migrating from a private engagement for top level executives with their coaches to organizations looking to create a full coaching culture in their workplaces. But what does that mean? Having a coaching culture is not telling your managers to coach better or to practice active listening. Coaching is a personal transformation because it allows everyone to develop a better version of themselves with these principles:
- Create Consciousness. Deepen your awareness of values, potential, empowering and limiting thoughts, perspectives and habits to understand what you want and need.
- Develop Leadership. Be the owner, own your change and your results. Leadership starts with your capacity to take yourself from A to B.
- Get Results. Change the way you think, talk and execute to achieve your results. And to help others do the same.
These are the 5 elements that you need to consider to create a successful coaching culture with your leaders and take your organization’s leadership to the next level.
- Starts from the top. No difference from other important key initiative in your organization, it must flow up-down with the CEO and Executive Team embracing coaching as the way to work and develop people. If you don’t have full buy-in from your CEO and active participation from him/her learning techniques, practicing them and mastering them then the team won’t follow. This is a project where your leadership needs to LEAD.
- Understand what it is. The key problem in the coaching profession is the common misunderstanding on what it is and what it is not. The definition and expectations of what a coach does are different in the minds of your Executive team members, VP’s, Directors and employees. If you want the project to succeed the first step is to establish what coaching is? What it will mean in this organization? What is the impact for employees? What is the impact for customers? What areas of the organization lend to use or implement coaching techniques? Create an assessment to align expectations on what it means to embrace this culture in your organization.
- Invest in good coaching skills leadership training. There are many programs in the market and as in anything else different levels of quality. Make sure you have a leadership program that is effective in creating coaching skills with your leaders. Ask how the classes are taught, for example our programs always present a new skill, demonstrate it, have participants to practice it and then debrief the experience and reaffirm learning and future practice activities are defined to solidify learning.
- Pick a program for managers and leaders not for coaches. You don’t want your management team to become professional coaches. In fact, you don’t want to get rid of management which will be still necessary to create results in your company. Coaching does not replace managing. What you want is leaders with great management skills who add to their repertoire coaching skills and learn when to coach and when to manage.
- Make it a company-wide project. Create in internal marketing campaign, adopt coaching as one of your company values and do all necessary to create awareness at all levels that a new culture is being implemented and what that means for everyone. This includes creating the mechanism to measure implementation and observe if new behaviors are being adopted by managers.
Several observable behaviors will be used by your managers as the coaching culture is adopted and you will see the tools in action through:
- Non-threatening productive conversations learning how to be a better leader.
- People development making your team more resourceful and showing up more with solutions than with problems.
- Improved interpersonal relationships and employee engagement through the exercise of listening, rapport and empathy techniques.
- Effective goal management and priorities. Based on a crystal-clear definition of goals, values, priorities and execution plans that bring results.
- A new way of communicating with new awareness on the language used in conversations and the power of words.
- High performance through the adoption of mindfulness in the organization, the ability to be fully present in projects and conversations and being non-judgmental to increase collaboration.
Need help? our Leadership with the Power of Coaching program is one of the key elements you will need to adopt this culture.