Leaders who want to create a coaching culture in their organization can do so by understanding what motivates their employees, rewarding them, and providing leaders with training skills. A coaching culture is one where the organization's predominant mentality and behaviors are similar to those of a coach. It is characterized by partnership and collaboration, curiosity, honest evaluation, self-motivation, and strategic thinking. To establish a coaching culture, leaders should get buy-in from key influencers, provide training skills, promote the benefits of a training culture, and mitigate common barriers.
The advantages of having a coaching culture are plentiful. It can lead to greater self-confidence, increased revenues, and improved employee retention, performance, and engagement. External coaches can be used to train members of senior management or when reporting structures create a conflict of interest between the internal coach and the person requesting the training. The best situation arises when business leaders and human resource professionals demonstrate training skills and a coaching mentality on their own.
To measure the success of a coaching culture, organizations should track employee retention, performance, engagement before and after training practices; track the promotion rate; create and review employee development plans; and evaluate the achievement of company goals every year. Coaching helps to eliminate blind spots, align the behavior of team members with the objectives of the organization, and maximize individual and team potential. Sir John and his colleagues at Performance Consultants were the first to bring coaching to the workplace and coined the term “performance coaching” in the early 1980s. A manager can use coaching competencies as their fundamental leadership style by default; however, it is not always appropriate or possible for every conversation with a direct report to be a pure coaching conversation.
