What is a coaching culture?
A coaching culture in a work environment helps support your employees in developing new skills, sharpening their ideas, and becoming more engaged in the workplace and with their peers. It involves everyone—from leadership to frontline employees—having better conversations with co-workers, superiors, subordinates, clients, and customers alike, to figure out how they can be a more effective support. It creates an environment in which everyone feels free to offer and receive constructive criticism and feedback on their work. People feel empowered to support each other’s ideas and aren’t afraid to push a co-worker’s thinking further. Ideas are openly discussed and challenged, and personal and professional growth is put at the forefront. A coaching culture takes into consideration where your employees want to be, personally and professionally, and makes it a key part of their development in their job.
How to build a coaching culture
All of your employees will likely have different personal and professional goals, so it’s important to gain an understanding of what they are before you start making changes. Too many companies apply a one-size-fits-all approach to training and development, meeting the needs of some but neglecting others. To have a coaching culture that works, it’s best to allow your employees some freedom in dictating their development. Success looks very different to different people—some employees may just want to do their current job well, and don’t aspire for much more. Others might wish to be a member of the executive leadership team one day. The key is to put measures in place that allow them to reach these goals without much disruption to their working lives, and without adding any more responsibility to their current role. It is a form of goal-setting that puts the power in the employee’s hands, alongside your guidance, in hopes of making them more productive, engaged, and willing to pass what they’ve learned along to others.
Set an example
Start by getting a coach or mentor for yourself and establishing exactly what you want out of the relationship. It will make your ambitions a lot more authentic in the eyes of your employees, and you’ll know first-hand what works and what doesn’t. If you try to put a coaching culture in place without having experienced its benefits first-hand, you’re setting yourself—and your employees—up for failure.
Let your employees choose their direction
Nobody likes constantly being told what to do and how to do it. This is especially true when it comes to professional development. Rather than dictating how your employees can improve (or even worse, pointing out their shortcomings), ask them how you can help them and what they’d like to do differently. Figure out what works for them, and think of ways to guide them accordingly. Putting employees in control of their development will empower them to really think about what they’d like to get out of the employment relationship, and you’ll have clear standards to uphold when the time comes to evaluate compensation or promotions.
Put trust in others
It’s easy to micromanage development, but it’s harder to assign a coaching role to a few key team members and task them with passing it on to their teammates. However, an important thing to remember is that a coaching culture (or any other aspect of your company culture for that matter) starts from the top down, so make sure you’re putting people in superior positions to mentor and develop others. Then, allow the mentees to do the same later on. As this repeats itself over time, you’ll have established a good coaching culture. Be wary of setting people up to fail, though—not everyone is going to be good at coaching, and some may outright reject this activity as doing more work for the same pay. It’s up to you to clearly communicate the benefits of coaching so everyone can understand its importance in their own development as well as the company’s success.
Make coaching a habit
In order to establish coaching as part of your workplace culture, it needs to become a repeatable, consistent part of what you do. Just like weightlifters don’t get strong by lifting weights just once a week, employees won’t feel the effects of coaching if it’s sporadic and limited to a certain time of the month. Some companies have career development cycles, whereby every few months, progress on the stated goals is revisited and any learnings are shared with the team. Initiatives like this infuse coaching into your employees’ performance review and their roles, so they’ll come to appreciate it as vitally important to their success. Instill it into everything you do, be consistent, and before you know it, it’ll become second nature.
Tie it to management
An effective manager knows how to motivate their teams for success, and coaching is a great way to help managers evaluate their teams and improve their output. By training your managers in proper coaching techniques, you’ll be able to see whether they’re truly able to lead, develop, and manage talent—as their job title suggests—or whether their role should be reevaluated. And if you’re unable to do this yourself, there are consultancies and business coaches you can hire for lunch-and-learns and other seminars.
Coach people yourself
We’ve all had that job where people in management said one thing and did another. It’s frustrating, hypocritical, and doesn’t bode well for team morale. Rather than make a fuss about coaching (or rather, the need for it), you ought to follow through on implementing it. Sticking to regular evaluation schedules, encouraging staff to offer different perspectives, and giving constant opportunities for others to take the lead will empower everyone to do better while giving them the confidence to speak up and coach their colleagues without you needing to make them. On the other hand, if you make a big deal about coaching and waste your employees’ time by not implementing it properly, nobody will benefit and you’ll have lost valuable time and money.
Listen
What some people consider “listening” is actually just waiting for their turn to talk. You can’t effectively coach someone if you aren’t willing or able to hear what they’re trying to say, what their needs are, where they want to be, and how they want to get there. Improving your listening skills should help you become a more effective employer and leader, not only because you’ll be able to respond properly to what your employees want, but you’ll be that much closer to helping them achieve their vision of success.
Practise, practise, practise
It’s rare, if not impossible, that you’ll be a great coach the first time you try. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s important to realize this when trying to institute a coaching culture. Leave yourself open to, and embrace, failure. Keep trying to improve on your shortcomings, and whatever you do, don’t blame your employees for your inability or unwillingness to coach. They need to see that you care about it before they’ll care about it. Remember, asking questions and listening are crucial to this process, and you at times may have simply misinterpreted their wishes. Request and incorporate feedback whenever you can—it’s one of the most reliable ways to assess whether your coaching style works or not, and whether there are ways you can work more directly with your employees to get them where they need to be.
Ask questions and be open-minded
Effective coaching often comes down to your willingness to be vulnerable and ask as many questions as possible. You are essentially acting in a support role, intending to empower your employees to do more and be more. There’s no universal solution to coaching an entire workforce, nor is there enough consideration given to diversity and inclusion when implementing these policies. That’s why it’s important to ask as many different people in your workplace as possible about their vision for the future, in terms of their professional lives, and where they see themselves in a few years. By uncovering these diverse opinions and including various perspectives in the process, you’ll be in a better position to implement a coaching culture that everyone can comfortably be a part of.
