How to Create a Coaching Culture in Your Organisation

A strong coaching culture can give your organisation far more than skilled employees.

Coaching can be highly effective in developing your staff and helping them work as a team as well as boosting engagement, output and profit.

The practice is all about encouraging employees to learn in new ways rather than just ‘teaching’ them via traditional methods.

This can help them to overcome personal barriers to learning and progress, encouraging every staff member to reach their full potential.

Whether you are going to bring in a professional coach or develop your own coaches in-house, it’s important to focus on the basics of coaching.

Read on for useful tips on creating a coaching culture in your business.

Know what needs fixing

Every organisation has its strengths and weaknesses. When building a coaching culture, it’s essential to know up front what’s working and what’s not.

This involves a detailed review of every aspect of your business and its performance, to ensure you are targeting the areas which really need your attention.

Consult your management team

Every manager needs to be on board with the new coaching culture, and it can’t really take root until you have their feedback and full support.

You may need to have detailed discussions about agreed goals and objectives to ensure everyone is on the same page and backing the program before your start to implement it.

Provide training for coaches

If you want to develop your own internal coaches, chosen candidates will probably need some suitable training to prepare them for their roles.

Professional coaches can also ‘train the trainer’, giving your managers expert tips as well as offering assessment, observation and ongoing supervision if necessary.

Ask, don’t tell

Start asking staff open ended questions as part of their regular performance reviews.

Instead of saying “Do it this way”, you could ask “I wonder why that way doesn’t work?” or “Have we looked at all the possibilities here?”

This encourages staff to think more critically and discover their own creative solutions to ongoing problems.

Use psychometric and behavioural tools

A range of measures including competency-based questions and psychometric tests are available to assess and develop employee performance.

Once employee strengths and weaknesses are analysed, appropriate coaching programs can be developed to enhance overall productivity.

Build strong teams

Coaching is a great way to develop and manage high-performing teams in your business.

By increasing communication, motivation, morale and a sense of purpose, managers can take big strides in helping people work together.

If you would like to explore this further, please feel free to contact one of our specialist consultants.