Management Perspectives

What are your aspirations and goals for 2023? If you had a magic wand, what would you really like to achieve in your business? What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

How can you inspire everyone to contribute their best?

These are simple questions, which can be difficult to answer.

But there is one thing which can really help, and that is building a coaching culture within your organisation.

Coaching can be your super-power, your successaccelerator, your organisation’s very own magic wand.

What is a coaching culture?

Coaching is fundamentally an approach which helps individuals develop self-awareness and self-responsibility, and thereby reach their full potential. Sir John Whitmore, a pioneer of workplace coaching, explains in his 1992 book Coaching for Performance, coaching is the art of facilitating another person’s learning, development, and performance. Through coaching, people are able to find their own solutions, develop their own skills, and change their own behaviours and attitudes. A true coaching culture runs throughout your entire organisation, creating an inclusive, supportive, high-performance environment where everyone is inspired to give their best.

Why do you need coaching in your business?

Within an organisational environment, coaching is increasingly being recognised as a key leadership capability and many organisations are working to create a coaching culture within their leadership teams. In their 2018 book, How to Create a Coaching Culture, Jones & Gorell explain, ‘creating a coaching culture is more than just creating coaching capability. It is about creating an organisation that identifies success with the ability to learn, adapt, and grow through the talents of its people’. They highlighted a range of tangible performance outcomes from coaching, such as increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, increased staff retention, and reduced training costs. These benefits can create transformational results for your business, your managers and your teams.

Here are three reasons why you need coaching in your business to be successful in today’s world, and three ways you can make a start, today.

• Benefits to the organisation

Coaching helps everyone define and achieve clear goals. It also improves organisational performance and productivity in the short and long term by developing an environment where employees are continuously looking for ways to improve. According to data provided by BetterUP1 , companies with a strong coaching culture have significantly higher year-on-year revenue growth (45 per cent higher) and five-year average revenue growth (14 per cent higher) than companies with a low coaching culture. Coaching facilitates problem-solving by enabling challenges to be quickly identified and resolved through goal setting and action planning. It thus enhances an organisation’s ability to adapt and change in our fast-moving world.

• Benefits to managers

Research by Gallup2 found an enormous 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager, so, as a leader, your impact on the motivation, well being, and productivity of your team is pivotal. Adopting a coaching approach means relinquishing the idea that a manager should provide all the answers and reduces the ‘parent-child’ dynamic of many manager-team relationships. When your team feel valued and trusted, they are empowered to take more responsibility for their own performance, which improves as skills and confidence grow within the team. Furthermore, this has the added benefit of freeing up time for managers to focus on other strategic tasks, because you are able to delegate more regularly as individuals work more independently. Learning to coach also dramatically improves your questioning, listening, and interpersonal skills, helping you to influence and communicate more effectively, so you can add wider value to the business through your enhanced capabilities.

• Benefits to the individual

Individuals from the generation now entering the workforce are increasingly focused on self-development and well being. A coaching culture shows people that you care and demonstrates your commitment to their learning and growth. A culture where people feel empowered and valued increases their engagement and motivation, while reducing absenteeism and attrition. When individuals are given regular feedback as part of a coaching culture, this increases their self-awareness, so they become more conscious of their own strengths, development areas, and personal values. A coaching culture enables individuals to establish clear personal and professional goals for themselves, develop robust plans, and take action to achieve these goals, gaining more job satisfaction by achieving success through their own efforts. As individuals become more independent and self-reliant, they can work more quickly as their skills and competence grow, take greater responsibility for their actions, and liaise more productively with others as their confidence increases. Coaching is also proven to enhance resilience, a key factor which helps people cope personally and support each other through tough times.

How do we create a coaching culture?

Companies with a high coaching culture tend to move away from more traditional performance management processes, with their relatively formal reliance on annual objectives and appraisals. Instead, they favour a more continuous and engaging system of regular one-on-ones with a shared formulation of dynamic performance objectives, which reflect people’s real-time goals and priorities. Replacing structured appraisals with regular, informal coaching conversations encourages openness, honesty and constructive feedback, enhancing adaptability and resilience.

A coaching culture starts with the managers and leaders acting as role models. Up-skilling a team of coaches to exemplify best practice can build beacons of excellence within an emerging coaching culture, creating a ripple effect across the organisation.

Building a coaching culture like this takes time, but here are three behaviours you can adopt today which will bring instant benefits:

• Ask; don’t tell

Next time someone asks your advice, instead of telling them what to do, try asking them a question instead. “What do you think you could do?” “What are your options?” “Why do you think this problem has arisen in the first place?” Questions like these, encouraging others to take ownership of their own solutions, are central to a coaching approach. Simply going through the process of explaining their challenge to you and talking through potential ways to resolve it can be enough for people to work out solutions for themselves. Coaching presupposes that your teams are resourceful and capable and empowers them by raising their awareness and sense of responsibility.

• Listen more than you speak

Making the effort to really listen can bring enormous benefits. It is a powerful way of making people feel really valued and encourages your team to raise their game, because they feel that their opinion really counts.

• Slow down

.If we are to ask more questions and listen more deeply, we will need to slow down our interactions to create space and time for people to think. A coaching conversation may take initially longer than simply issuing instructions, but as people become more resourceful and independent and begin to take more responsibility for their own outcomes, it can save a huge amount of time and effort going forward.

My favourite definition of a coach is simply ‘a thinking partner’…someone to stimulate more strategic, deeper thinking. If we can ask more questions, listen more mindfully, and slow down our pace, these small changes will enable a big shift from controlling to coaching, helping our teams to take responsibility for their own performance and personal development, with all the advantages this can bring. And you will immediately start to benefit from the effects of your new coaching approach, your very own magic wand.