Developing A Coaching Culture

• The benefits of developing a coaching culture; for individuals, teams and the wider organisation.
• The drivers behind developing a coaching culture.
• What an organisation should know before trying to introduce a coaching culture.
• The main barriers to developing an effective coaching culture.
• The importance of senior leadership buy-in and support in developing a successful, lasting coaching culture.
• Measuring the effectiveness of a coaching.
• Top tips for developing and maintaining an effective coaching culture.

Transcript

Female interviewer: Karen Summers is a qualified business coach and Director of Leadership and Coaching at Wired Connected Consulting. She has over twenty years experiences in career transition, executive coaching and coaching for performance improvement. Karen has worked with many organisations at a strategic level to help them successfully introduce and develop a coaching culture.

We started by asking Karen to explain what a coaching culture is and what it should look like when it works well within an organisation.

Karen Summers: I think when a coaching culture is working really well, it is probably a bit akin to an organisation being a learning organisation. The leaders and managers within the business have the coaching skills within their armoury so they can pull back from giving all the answers to the people that they are involved with on a day to day basis. So they have got it there within their skill set and it is just a natural thing that they can bring into their daily working life.

I think sometimes it is quite good also to describe what it wouldn’t look like. So for me it wouldn’t look like people patronising each other; it wouldn’t look like they were kind of clunky, and what I mean by that is that they haven’t really got the refined skill, you know, it is not a blunt instrument in somebody’s hands. It wouldn’t look manipulative and people wouldn’t be working with hidden agendas.

Female interviewer: And what would you describe as the kind of main benefits of having a coaching culture at kind of individual team and at the organisational level as well?

Karen Summers: I very much see it being part of empowering and engaging people within the business. You know if we think about our own experiences of being at work, you know, if you are working with somebody who you feel has got time for you, listens to you, cares about what you think, if they are dealing with you in a coaching style, they are naturally asking you insightful questions, they are asking you for your opinion, and it is actually very motivational.

So it is extremely beneficial in that it makes for people to be able to contribute more; it is very developmental, it allows people to be more resourceful because if I know I am going to be asked for my opinion, then, you know, maybe I am going to do a bit more preparation up front, I am going to think about things in a more rounded way, I am not just going to wait to be spoon fed. You know, we all know people leave bad managers and it therefore is a really genuine way of investing quality time with people.

It is also a way of overcoming issues in a sustainable way so I think that it has got a long term benefit. And I have seen it with some of my clients; it has allowed them to have conversations that they just wouldn’t have been able to have. You often think of things that maybe are in the ‘too hard’ tray and you maybe feel you are bored, they kind of know that those issues are there, but they just kind of ignore them. Often it is the people, staff, relationship related things. Working with them to develop the coaching skills actually has side benefits that they improve their communication skills and their relationship building skills as well.

Female interviewer: You said earlier Karen that you have worked with organisations across lots of different sectors. What are some of the typical kind of drivers that you have come across and that organisations have that really kind of get them thinking about why they want to move towards this coaching culture?

Karen Summers: I think the ones who do it in a very sustained and positive way are looking to improve the calibre of leaders and leadership that they have got within the business. I have worked with clients who are looking to build a stronger board and then also develop the next tier of managers.

I think a number of clients recognise that being a good coach requires excellent self awareness, listening, sensory acuity, and that these things are actually really useful within the business at heart. There are also clients who are maybe doing a lot of work around a continuous improvement culture and therefore there is a very natural fit with thinking about the people side of that and the coaching skills side of it as well.

Female interviewer: And in your experience, what do you think an organisation really needs to know right at the beginning, before it embarks on the journey towards developing a coaching culture?

Karen Summers: Yes, I think this is an interesting question because I think, you know, sometimes people might jump on bandwagons; they see in the literature about coaching culture and might think, well, you know, that sounds interesting, sexy, new, let’s have a go at that, but my advice would be really to stop and think specifically why your business wants to do this, you know, what is it. And then we can talk about, you know, what degree of readiness is there within the business for getting started.

I would also want to know, you know, what they hope success would look like to make sure that there is enough clarity because it is really difficult to determine the way forward and putting sensible metrics in place if you don’t have that real, kind of, driver for change, it just feels like it might be a nice thing to do, I think that is not enough. I think there needs to be a real case for specifically what we are going to get from doing this. Because, you know, it is going to take some time, it is going to take some investment to get there, so without that, then we could perhaps lose the way a little bit.

Female interviewer: And just drilling down a little bit deeper into those kind of issues that you were talking about, what are some of the most, kind of, common barriers that organisations might face when they try to introduce a coaching culture?

Karen Summers: I think that there are some barriers. I think the natural kind of human one is cynicism. You know, people have perhaps worked in a particular way; it has served them well for a number of years, and as with any change, why should they change their behaviour, why should they change their style? So I think there has got to be work done around that so that people actually do come on board and start to recognise the benefits of employing a coaching culture.

You know, I often get managers just to think about, you know, in the home situation, if you have got children for example, are you still tying shoelaces for your twenty year old? No absolutely not, and the reason for that is that you have actually, you have taken a step back maybe when the little one was maybe four years old and actually coached them to be able to do it for themselves. And it is similar skills in the workplace that you can transfer from parenting into the workplace. If you want to be really, really busy and spoon feeding your team, then you know, don’t go near coaching, but if you want to empower people, if you want them to be the best that they can be, then maybe there is another way and coaching can be one of those mechanisms to support that.

Female interviewer: And you talked a little bit there about challenging cynicism. What are some practical things that organisations can do to successfully overcome that barrier and help coaching be embedded more effectively?

Karen Summers: When I have been brought in as an external to work with an organisation, what I have usually done is speak to people in advance to demystify kind of who I am and why I am, you know, rocking up for the business and then talking about all this coaching stuff. So you can start to get underneath it a little bit before you actually get together and get involved in any skills type of workshop.

And I think the other thing is really to push the project leader, whether it is the MD or an HR professional, just to make sure that some groundwork has been done around that because it is natural that that would pop up.

I think the other thing that I have experienced is that, you know, not to underestimate the skills development work that needs to be done because moving to a coaching style does require a change of habits for some people and often times I am working with people who have been promoted because of their technical excellence and therefore, in a way, they have been paid because they know the answer and what we are saying in a coaching world is, okay, you may have an answer, but you know, how much better that you put heads together and possibly come up with a better solution through dialogue, through insightful questioning and through giving people perhaps closer to the issue the opportunity to come up with some solutions themselves.

Female interviewer: So Karen, how important do you feel that it is to get the senior leadership of an organisation on board when introducing the coaching culture?

Karen Summers: I think it is absolutely vital. I don’t think you can underestimate that. People look to these people for their leadership; they look for signs that perhaps they are not really believing or they are not kind of walking the talk. So I think it is absolutely vital.

I think it is really, really also important that they don’t over comment on the new culture and that they are clear about culturally where they are at the outset, and normally I would do some work with a client to try to sort of pin down what is good about the existing culture so we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Equally, we have got in line of sight where they want to get to and this allows us to have some good conversations about, you know, the degree of difficulty in getting there. It is important that the senior leaders recognise that people for when they see it, that they are making a shift in style. You know what it is like, if you push yourself out of your comfort zone, then the first time you do it, it isn’t comfortable, you do feel a bit awkward and I think people can then kind of retreat back into their shell and into their own old ways so I think it is kind of slowly, slowly supporting people to actually be bold and brave and take the steps to widen their repertoire.

Female interviewer: Once organisations are kind of up and running with the coaching culture and it has been in place for some time, how can they go about measuring the effectiveness of it?

Karen Summers: With the clients I have worked with, what we have tried to do is build the metrics into things that they are already surveying, so things like their employee engagement survey, also perhaps measure the effectiveness of their appraisal discussions. A lot of companies maybe measure the return, as in the paper element of that, but I would encourage some feedback around the quality of the discussion which I think is absolutely the most important part of that and coaching can really underpin that discussion. So other metrics, retention, motivation, I think probably could be wrapped into the engagement survey if it is a large organisation. If it is a smaller organisation, then perhaps just some informal perception measures as well around just having dialogue with people about how it is going and what difference is it making, and capturing some of that as stories and making sure that the wider business are aware of it.

Female interviewer: Tell me about what you have seen or maybe what you have done yourself with organisations that has really been that little bit different and which has really worked quite well in terms of introducing and implementing a successful coaching culture.

Karen Summers: I think the main thing that I try to do is develop the coaching culture as part of a wider leadership and management proposition and I think that has positioned things well. I think it has avoided some of the cynicism that can come with it feeling like a flavour of the month. If it is part of a more holistic sense of, you know, who are you as a leader and how can you be more impactful as a leader and the business changes that are necessary to drive and connecting that with why there is a shift towards the coaching culture. That has been the way that has really, really helped.

I don’t think I have got any sort of hidden secrets, but I think the quality of the training as well is really powerful.

One of the things that I have done is try to model a live coaching session for people actually in the training, because how often do we go to a training session and actually we break off into small groups, we do our own thing, but we only get to experience what it was we did or what it was we experienced with the people who we were working with in the small group. What I have done is effectively put up front, okay, I have brought along a coaching colleague, we are actually going to have a live coaching session, we are going to set it up in the way that we would normally and we are kind of going to ignore the fact that you are there as our audience and then afterwards you can critique, ask questions and just give us a flavour of how that landed for you, how that is different to what you do, how it is similar to what you do.

I think people have really valued that because it requires a little bit of courage in terms of, because it will be real things that we are talking about, real issues and real things that we would naturally want to have a coaching session on, but we are doing that with an audience and I think that is perhaps something that is a bit different.

Female interviewer: Business coaching often draws parallels with coaching in sport and I wondered what your view is on what the business community can actually learn from the sporting world when it comes to effective coaching?

Karen Summers: Absolutely, and I think it is something where the business world is only just catching up with sport. We know from, you know, sports like football, the coach doesn’t have to be the best footballer on the pitch. They have got a very different perspective and they can bring something different to the parties for the benefit of the actual players.

I think one thing we overlooked in business is using things like positive visualisation to prepare for things so how many times do you hear a colleague say, ‘oh my goodness, I have got a presentation to the Board’, and maybe they are a little bit nervous about giving the best performance that they can. Now what they will naturally be doing is maybe thinking about all the things that can go wrong and what I would try to encourage them to do is to use the brain as a powerful bit of kit and start to imagine things going really, really well so that they are really engaging all of their resources and guess what, if you think about it going well, it probably will. You will start to think about the whole rehearsal, the things that we need to have in place that are going to make us feel in the best possible position.

Conversely, we are much, much better at getting out of bed on a morning and saying this is going to be a really bad day, the presentation is going to be a disaster and actually we can actually rehearse for that happening whereas I think we need to think more about using positive visualisation to help us to be the best that we can be. So I think that that is really one thing.

Again, even in the way that we give feedback. Feedback can often be a word that we use and people think, ‘oh oh, here it comes, I am going to get something negative here’, but what we can use from a feedback point of view is to focus on the positive.

So in a footballing scenario you might say, ‘hey that was brilliant you have just hit seven out of ten of the penalties that you have taken’. Sometimes human nature, we zero in on the three that were missed. But what we would then do is say ‘right, what was happening to those seven, what can we draw forward in a future penalty shoot out that you have learnt that we can move towards eight or ten out of ten?’

And equally, in the work setting, then, you know, you might be giving somebody some feedback on a 360 appraisal for example, and they might have got some very, very favourable feedback from one group, say their clients, but maybe their peers were not quite as positive with the feedback. So we could use the same analogy there and say, you know, what is it that is going on with the clients, what are you doing differently, what could you draw on there that perhaps you have not been doing with your peer group?

So I think there are a number of things that we can use to help people to improve and really benefit from, like I say, what the sports psychologists have been doing for a long time.

Female interviewer: And just to kind of bring things to a close Karen, what would be your three kind of top tips that you would offer to organisations who want to implement their own coaching culture in the most successful way possible?

Karen Summers: I think the first one is be absolutely clear about why you want to do this and don’t expect a coaching culture to be a panacea or for things to change overnight. Two, make an investment in developing skills and link those skills to the wider sustained leadership journey, and three, walk the talk. Use the skills yourself and really model good practice so that people can start to see the benefits and that you are really serious about this being a long-term thing.