So far, in our series about creating a coaching culture in an organisation, we’ve looked at what is the problem you are trying to solve?, experiencing coaching, integrating coaching into every process and how will we know it’s been successful?. What else do we need to think about when creating a coaching culture?
You know from the above what the culture change is that you are trying to achieve in the business, based on the business strategy. You also know how managers can contribute across the employee journey. But where can professional executive coaching add the most value to the organisation and the individuals within it? It’s important to have some focus to the coaching offering – who will you provide professional coaching for, to meet what needs?
How do we define professional coaching vs. using a coaching approach?
Everyone can use a coach approach, with perhaps a couple of days of training. Professional coaches, however, have undergone a deep process of learning about the mindset and skill-set for coaching, both in training and through coaching supervision. As a result, they generally understand more about the psychology of learning and behaviour change. Professional coaches contract specifically for coaching, where managers as coaches sometimes wear different hats.
You might already be using professional coaching, so start there – what are you using it for currently, and is it having the impact you had hoped for?
Then fill in the gaps by asking what will best enable you to meet the business strategy and culture change? It could be any of the following, or it could be something else:
- Developing your leaders to step up, particularly as they take on more scope and scale
- On-boarding new senior hires
- Getting people ready for promotion/a new role
- Enabling people in new roles to embrace the new expectations of the role – and let go of old expectations
- Developing managers to use a coach approach to support performance achievement
- Developing teams to work better together
- Changing the culture
- ….
The list goes on, so it is important to prioritise, once the list has been generated specifically for your organisation.
This can then help you to identify the actual populations to whom you might offer coaching.
Each of these will take a good deal of planning to get them right, so don’t bite off more than you can chew to start with.
What are your experiences of identifying where coaching adds value to your organisation?
