What is Coaching Culture?

How to Build a Coaching Culture in the Workplace

Do you need a better vibe in your office? If your work environment is really getting you down, it’s time to introduce a coaching culture. This can completely change the climate of your workplace by providing employees at all levels with the opportunity to improve their skills and achieve their goals. After all, everyone in your company is important and wants to feel like their work matters. And it does!

When you build a coaching culture within a company, you’re boosting self-confidence, which leads to increased income. If your employees feel valued, they will work harder and generally feel happier. This leads to more productivity and profits overall. It’s a win-win for any business!

You might be asking yourself: What exactly is a coaching culture? And how can I build this culture for my company? More and more organizations are recognizing the value of a coaching culture, but many fail to implement one because they simply don’t know how. We can help you create a coaching culture, putting you and your company on the road to a happier, more prosperous workplace.

What is a Coaching Culture

First, let’s look at the definition of coaching — a systematicresults-oriented process that facilitates life experience and goal achievement in both personal and professional life. This primarily describes a formal coaching relationship, but different types of coaches can coexist within an organization. Basically, coaches help people achieve their goals and better their lives! Maybeyou’re an intern, but your dream is to be a CEO. Set a goal and make it happen! So how does coaching apply to the workplace? Well, everycompany and employee needs goals. A coach can help get the group where they need to be. Just like players on a sports team need a coach to cheer them on during tough plays, employees also need a bit of extra encouragement to get through a long work week or project. Professor Peter Hawkins, author of Creating a Coaching Culture, put it best: “When a coaching approach is a key aspect of how leaders and employees engage and develop, all of their employees and stakeholders create higher individual team and organizational performance.” That’s how you know a coaching culture truly exists in yourorganization — when everything becomes a shared value for all stakeholders.

Foundation of a Coaching Culture

To foster a coaching culture, organizations can train internal leadership managers and employees to coach and motivate other employees. This newly-trained internal coach will then contract with an external coach who offers one-on-one coaching sessions to help unlock the employee’s full potential.

Regardless of how a coach views an organization, many researchers agree on the foundation of coaching:

Clients are inherently creative, resourceful, and complete
Coaching addresses the whole person
The agenda comes from the client, not the coach
Coaches and clients are partners, working together as equals based on mutual respect
Coaching is about action that inspires change

A coach is a catalyst that your employees need to help them achieve their professional goals and have your business thrive.

Key Indicators of a Coaching Culture

How do you know when a coaching culture exists within your organization? Are your employees happy, productive, and eager to come to work and contribute to the team? Coaching culture can be demonstrated by the climate of the organization. Take a look around. You should be able to feel and see the shift to a more positive environment.

Organizations with a coaching culture generally maintain a high level of psychological safety, meaning people feel comfortable expressing and being themselves. This is extremely important as you don’t want your employees to feel like they are “walking on eggshells” or afraid to share an idea. You want people to be able to communicate, laugh, and feel at ease at work. They will get more done if they are not so worried about what others will think or say if they express themselves.

A safe workplace helps employees give and receive feedback freely, ask questions, participate in developmental dialogue and communicate openly.

A 2019 work culture case study revealed several foundations of coaching culture:

90% of respondents felt that their manager listened to their point of view
88% felt that open communication with their manager led to better work decisions.
Employees are much more productive at work when asked about their thoughts and ideas.

How to Build a Coaching Culture in Your Company

Coaching cultures can vary across organizations, but one important coaching approach should remain the same — mutual respect and positive psychology. These are both key aspects of employee development. So how do you build a coaching culture within your company?

Several Key Strategies of Building a Coaching Culture:

Gain Buy-In From Key Stakeholders

Research shows that a lack of support can prevent large organizations with adequate budgets from implementing coaching programs. If you want to gain buy-in from your key influencers, one of the most effective strategies is to let them experience coaching on their own. Let them see for themselves how a coaching culture can improve the company.

Sometimes seeing is believing! If you can help key stakeholders experience the benefits that the coaching research shows (a positive impact on mental health and well-being, an enhanced sense of purpose, more employee engagement, etc.), they are likely to become advocates of the coaching method.

Provide Your Leadership
With Coaching Skills

According to Harvard Business Review, the role of the manager is changing to that of the coach. Even if you contract with an external certified coach, it can be beneficial to equip internal leaders with coaching skills.

Managers should take an active role in creating a coaching culture,including being role models, participating in self-training, and promoting other benefits of this culture.

The International Coach Federation (ICF) encourages organizations toprovide training and peer mentoring for managers and leaders.

Data shows that the ideal duration of coach training is between 30 and60 hours. Top coaching skills include empathy and emotion for relationship-builtding intelligence.

ICF data also shows that 96% of trainees are satisfied with the coaching experience, indicating that it’s positive for everyone across the board.

Benefits of Promoting a Coaching Culture

Fortunately, coaching research has proven its worth over the past two decades and is widely recognized as a powerful tool for addressing personal development and organizational problems. However, if managers and professionals don’t understand why coaching is so important, they won’t be fully engaged in the process. So why do this? Lots of reasons:

Boosts employee confidence
Creates more opportunities for career growth
Increases job satisfaction
Improves job performance
Builds more effective communication skills
Enhances goal achievement
Creates a more productive workplace
Promotes mental health
Happier employees

There are also many positives for businesses that arise from a coaching culture. Researchers O’Connor and Cavanagh call this result the “coaching ripple effect”: if the employees are happy, more productive, and less stressed, the company will make more money overall.

Companies associate coaching culture with:

Improved employee retention (65%)
Employee engagement (49%)
Revenue (48%)

Mitigate Common Barriers

Everything we do in life has obstacles, but overcoming them is definitely worth it for the company and its employees. You might come across two potential barriers when starting your coaching culture, but don’t give up! The ICF study revealed these barriers:

Limited support from senior leadership (50%)
The inability to measure the impact of coaching (42%)

These two obstacles can be minimized by gaining buy-in from key stakeholders through first-hand coaching experience and the quantifiable benefit of promoting a coaching culture.

While the growth of coaching dates back to the 1980s, current digital capabilities make it easier to track employee progress and measure impact. It’s recommended to track and measure employee retention performance and engagement before and after coaching exercises. You can also track:

Promotion rates
Employee development plans
Achievement of company goals

How to Start Building a Coaching
Culture at Your Company

A coaching culture benefits both the employee and the organization. Coaching culture has three main benefits:

Coaching is the most effective measure during times of change and transformation
Coaches create a culture of continuous learning and growth
Coaching strongly demonstrates its contribution to personal and organizational success

If you want to build a coaching culture in your organization, it starts with gaining the support of key influencers. You must equip leaders with coaching skills, promoting the benefits of a coaching culture and reducing common barriers.

A coaching culture can boost self-confidence in your employees, which, in turn, can increase your organization’s revenue. Your workforce will benefit from a coaching approach rooted in mutual respect and positive psychology. Your employees will be happy. Your customers will be happy. And your company will be more successful. Start building a coaching culture today.