How to Create a Coaching Culture

A Practical Introduction

Gillian Jones, Ro Gorell

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780749483272
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749483289
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Management approaches and workplace culture help determine employee productivity, morale, talent acquisition and retention, and organizational adaptability.

How to Create a Coaching Culture is a practical guide to embedding effective coaching behaviours within an organization to empower and engage employees to perform at their best. Using a combination of practical tools, assessments, case studies and examples, it provides guidance on how to plan and develop a strategy aligned to your organization and its goals, engage the board to secure 'buy-in', and how to effectively measure and evaluate initiatives in every stage of the employee lifecycle.

This fully updated second edition of How to Create a Coaching Culture contains new material on promoting employee engagement, reinventing performance reviews, and new and updated case studies from HarperCollins, British Airways and Leanintuit. Online resources include a series of downloadable templates and tools to use in practice, including a board report, communication strategy, development plan, and pre- and post-course training assessment.

HR Fundamentals is a series of succinct, practical guides for students and those in the early stages of their HR careers. They are endorsed by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the UK professional body for HR and people development, which has over 145,000 members worldwide.

PART ONE

FUNDAMENTALS

01

What is a coaching culture?

Creating a coaching culture is more than just creating coaching capability. It’s about creating an organization that identifies success with the ability to learn, adapt and grow through the talents of its people.

In a world coming to terms with the pace of change, disruptive technologies and global socio-political shifts, no organization can afford to rest on its laurels. Business strategy now focuses on innovation and design thinking in markets that are seeing 180-degree pivots. Aligning your business strategy with culture is the smart thing to do. In this chapter we explore in Part A what is meant by a coaching culture. In Part B we consider how to create a vision.

PART A: COACHING CULTURE DEFINED

What is culture?

Before we begin our journey together in creating a coaching culture we need to establish what we mean by some core concepts. You might be familiar with the term ‘coaching’ or you might not. Similarly, your professional development might have included exposure to the concept of culture or it might not. We make no assumptions about prior knowledge. We often use verbal shorthand to imply meaning as if it were universally understood. The word ‘culture’ is one of these shorthand words – even though culture can and does mean different things to different people depending on the context. At the beginning of our journey to creating a coaching culture it’s worth exploring what we mean by culture and posing the question to you. How do you define culture?

Nancy’s story below gives us a snapshot of how culture manifests itself in everyday working situations. Behind the scenes we can surmise that there is a basic set of assumptions that are shared by the organization, and in this case the board, to shape the way it operates on a day-to-day basis. The fact that these assumptions have persisted over time creates and perpetuates the culture experienced by Nancy.

FIGURE 1.1 Cultural model

Cultural model

In the related culture of tribes there is also lower focus on global control and structure; rather, the tribe is self-directed and creates its own controls. There is also less focus on any one individual and more on the collective kudos of the related tribe. They might form part of a larger organization or be collections of professionals. The controls and processes in place are there to help the tribe make sense of how they work together and the collective view of what’s acceptable or not becomes a qualifier for new members to join the tribe. The most obvious examples here are lawyers or accountants, but it can be any group that shares a common interest in retaining the collective benefits of the tribe.

The next two categories are similar but different; similar in that they both rely on structure and controls to function but different in that hierarchies operate vertically whereas matrixed organizations work horizontally. In other words, one relies on status and the other relies on function. In hierarchical cultures there is likely to be a set grading structure with clear demarcation lines between roles and levels. In matrixed organizations the demarcation lines are around projects or job families.

This simple model can help you identify at a very broad level what type of culture you experience in your organization. As we said before, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is that type of culture, but it does give you a starting point on which to carry out further investigations. Think of yourself as an organizational anthropologist – your experience of your organization will both inform and shape how you assess your starting point. There are lots of cultural assessment tools on the market to help you get under the skin. Remember, organizations are typically complex. What really matters is what you do with what you learn, how you craft your hypotheses, and test and iterate to make progress. In this book we want to understand what the culture landscape is so that we can craft a journey to a different destination.

Defining the term ‘coaching’

Defining culture is the first step but to complete the circle we need to define what we mean by coaching. The definition of coaching varies widely but there are some common themes. Below are some quotations from renowned executive coaches that show the range of the definition:

The art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another. (Miles Downey, 2003)

A conversation, or series of conversations, one person has with another. (Julie Starr, 2003)

Coaching is an enabling process to increase performance, development and fulfilment. (Graham Alexander and Ben Renshaw, 2005)

We offer our own definition as:

A conversation where the coach acts as the facilitator to the coachee, so that they learn, gain insight and take action toward a specific and agreed outcome.

Having read these definitions, what might your definition of coaching be? What might other people in the organization say if you were to ask them to define coaching? In our experience managers often confuse coaching with directing and advising.

Empowerment explained

Implicit in the term coaching is the notion of empowerment – that the coachee takes responsibility for their own learning and is ready, willing and able to take action to make progress. When we talk about empowerment in the context of a coaching culture we mean people being empowered to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their actions whilst managers support them through utilizing a coaching style.

We remember a lot of buzz in the business world years ago about the new management phenomenon labelled ‘empowerment’. This was the way forward for businesses, the ‘holy grail’ that all organizations had been looking for! Time to finally shake off all those ingrown roots of control theory management and telling people what to do! Managers were dutifully informed that if they empowered their team and let them make decisions for themselves then life would be easier for them as a manager, performance would be the responsibility of the employee and profits would soar.

Funnily enough, not all employees seemed thrilled at the prospect of having the ‘empowerment thing’ done to them! The hard and fast cynics who had done several rounds of management initiatives prepared themselves for the inevitable hype that went with the latest HR craze and dampened the spirits of the fresh-faced newer recruits who seemed excited by the prospect.

Gillian remembers working with one enthusiastic MD who bought and distributed to all 300 managers copies of a book he had become extraordinarily excited about – Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment: How to improve productivity, quality and employee satisfaction, by William C Byham (which was indeed a very good read – a fairy story which exposed the fact that empowerment was not just about moving the responsibility to the employee but was a whole mindset for managers that took effort, application and a new skillset):

I suspect the majority of managers never got to reading those later chapters as I came across very few organizations who were anywhere near that wonderful Utopia. The cynics in the organizations prophesized that it would never work and dug their heels in waiting for the next ‘management fad’ to come along. Managers gradually reverted to learned behaviours – telling people what to do was far quicker and came more naturally than tapping into a person’s potential and taking the time to develop them!

Gillian’s experience of an organization ‘trying’ to change culture is not unique. Creating and developing a culture is the role of leaders and the concept of empowerment is exactly what organizations do need and will always need. Most wise managers know that 95 per cent of people can solve their own problems given the right climate to do so and if we can encourage managers to create that climate we are half way towards empowering staff. As we dug deeper into organizations we both separately came to a realization: organizations were, and in our experience still ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface: how it all began…
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE Fundamentals
• PART TWO In practice
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover