Creating and Managing Coaching Programs
The challenge of promoting the necessary culture, talent, and leadership to support business strategies in today's complex organizational environments makes one-off and ad hoc coaching activities inefficient and ineffective. This is particularly true when it comes to coaching, because coaching is often delivered one-on-one or to only a few people in an organization, and it can easily remain hidden and disconnected from broader organizational goals and initiatives. A strategic, systemic approach to coaching, by contrast, is more likely to lead to sustainable results in terms of outcomes and the organizational impact that it is hoped will follow. Indeed, an ultimate goal for many organizations is to extend the benefits of coaching throughout its culture—to create a coaching culture—such that developmental conversations, reflection, and multilevel learning become embedded in the everyday behavior and attitudes of organizational leaders at all levels. Potential benefits of such a culture go beyond individual performance and development to team and organizational performance, as well as to employee retention and engagement. Moreover, a coordinated, systemic approach to coaching allows for visibility, management, and evaluation, the better to ensure an appropriate use of resources and a return on the investment of those resources.
So how do you, as an HR leader, plan and drive the development of a coaching culture within your organization? What are other companies doing that you could learn from? What range of coaching-related activities could contribute to an integrated approach to embedding coaching and learning into the culture of your organization? How do you decide what your organization needs and what it is ready for? How do you leverage outside resources as part of the equation, and how do you manage internal resources that are part of developmental activities? And, finally, how do you evaluate the effectiveness of any of these coaching-related initiatives in your organization to ensure that they are delivering the return intended?
Part 1 serves as a resource for you, the HR leader, as you consider these questions in the context of your organization. It can also be a resource to you as you consult with and educate the senior leadership of your organization as you work to incorporate coaching into its talent and leadership strategy. Chapter 1 lays the foundation for thinking through the nuts and bolts of developing and managing coaching programs by providing some benchmark data from the most recent Conference Board survey on the internal use of coaching in organizations, including recent trends and thoughts on future directions. Chapter 2 dives into the needs and readiness assessment processes, prompting you to ask the questions necessary to clarify the unique demands of your specific context and the indicators of readiness or challenge that should be taken into account in developing next step plans for your organization. Chapter 3 serves as a “thought partner,” with which you can interact to consider the variety of activities or components that might contribute to a coaching culture and which ones and which combinations make the most sense for your organization given its strategic goals.
Having comparative data on other organizations' coaching activities and assessing the needs and readiness of your own organization are important elements to ensuring that quality in your development efforts is only half of the coaching culture equation. Understanding the value and impact of coaching initiatives at the individual, team, and organizational levels is the other half. The topic of evaluation is covered in chapter 4, including models for the evaluation of coaching, best practices, and a new instrument recently developed at CCL, the Coaching Evaluation Assessment (CEA), for understanding coaching impact and the quality of coaching. This part ends with chapter 5, which covers the complicated topic of managing pools of coaches, from recruitment and selection to supervision and accreditation. Drawing on years of CCL's own experience and that of HR leaders within its client organizations across the globe, part 1 offers proven cutting-edge advice to you as you design your own approach to a coaching culture.
All of the authors who contributed chapters to this part provide well-grounded resources, drawn from research and experience, trial and error, successes and failures, and their work will give you a head start in the do-it-yourself process of creating a coaching culture that fits with your organization's values and goals.
