Advantages of creating a coaching culture

With so much noise surrounding coaching these days it is hard to distinguish between good practice within coaching and mentoring and interventions that are merely responding to a fashionable trend.

Coaching has grown of age over the past 30 years, with many organisations using both internal coaches and mentors, as well as using external experts to deliver outstanding individual results. Yet despite this maturity within the coaching and mentoring area, I still come across pockets of excellence of business coaching that have failed to move from isolated examples into long term and sustainable methods of doing business. The main reason for this I believe is the lack of published and substantiated success of how coaching and mentoring can impact effectively on corporate objectives.

Most coaching and mentoring interventions appear to remain at the 1:1 level. This is not surprising as coaching and mentoring is often provided to support the individual, however the importance of the individual’s development should have a wider impact than on just their own performance and ability.

For coaching to be able to demonstrate how it benefits the greater success of the organisation, we need to consider the knock on affect they have within their role, their department and ultimately on how they contribute to the success of the business.

Professor Peter Hawkins talks about the systemic approach to coaching where a coach considers the wider implication of a clients challenge when supporting in a 1:1 session. This can be illustrated below.

By considering the wider effects of the outcomes from the coachees activity, we can start to identify how the coachees improvements is impacting on organisation objectives and consider how such improvements might be having an impact on:

·        Increased quality

·        Increased quantity

·        Increased margins

·        Reduced costs.

Combining the systemic consideration regarding impact on the individual who is being coached and how that impacts their immediate team, their department, the organisation and their clients or benefactors, we can ensure that an individual’s development can have a positive impact all round.

By considering the impact in terms of output we can identify where the value add is of the coaching intervention which in turn can highlight tangible and evidenced value to the organisation.

Over the past 6-7 years I have been involved with several projects where implementing a coaching and mentoring programme have delivered some great results.

During this period, I have witnessed and have had described to me numerous stories where great examples of coaching and mentoring schemes are delivering real differences to people’s lives and organisational output.

These examples have come from a diverse range of organisations in commercial and not for profit environments and have included various levels of participants ranging from challenging youngsters, often struggling with life in general; those new into line management roles and seeking to make a success of their careers; senior business leaders with grey hair and “many years of doing things the traditional way” but still open to an alternative method to deliver leadership results and qualities.

Many of these schemes have claimed to have shown a fantastic improvement on performance and on individual behaviours, they also claim to have played a significant role in change related projects. Regrettably however many have struggled to prove the return on investment to major stakeholders and are often subject to the same fate that is bestowed on the HR and training budget when times get tough; i.e. cut.

I have also seen and shared stories with champions of coaching and mentoring programmes who have created some fantastic schemes only to learn that they have fallen in decline, or worse still, been cancelled soon after the champion left the organisation.

So how best can we work toward building successful programmes that not only succeed today, but have the ability and structure to become part of the organisational fabric or, “the way we do things around here”?

Coaching and mentoring provide excellent techniques as part of an organisation’s portfolio of development methodology. They are predominantly 1:1 intervention, although good use is sometimes made of group coaching techniques. It is the 1:1 nature of coaching and mentoring however that has caused a challenge when linking back an individual’s development to the wider context of the organisation.

Katherine Tulpa, CEO and founder of the Association of Coaches wrote an interesting foreword for “Supervision in Coaching”, where (as of first publication 2011) she refers to coaching as coming of age as a profession. She suggests that the next phase is to establish this young, emerging technique as a method of management that is globally recognised. This can be achieved by the appealing delivery of both the coachees and the coaches on-going development using the experience we gain as coachees and coaches to further enhance our skills in self-development. We should add mentors and mentees to this statement.

This suggests a methodology where self-reflection and experiential learning can begin to drive coaching and mentoring from the 1:1 and into a wider improvement cycle.

I believe where the struggle has been to date is around the challenge of being able to take coaching from 1:1 development and linking this back to business objectives.

Katherine Tupla raised the issue so practicing coaches can raise the profile of coaching and mentoring from 1:1 into a management methodology. She was particularly suggesting supervision can support this process and I would take this a step further and build supervision and support of the coaching and mentoring into part of a management improvement cycle, maybe incorporating this back into the annual review process.

There are some exciting and valuable reasons for an organisation to consider developing the ad-hoc or pockets of coaching success into a method for doing business across the organisation, not least of which is to support developing whole departments and not just individuals.

1.     Coaching is a proactive approach and not remedial.

All too often, individuals have been referred to coaching and mentoring schemes because they are under performing and as such, coaching and mentoring has been viewed within an organisation as offering a remedial service. This is a shame as many outstanding performers view coaching and mentoring as a method to become even greater.

If we consider coaching from a sporting context, most great athletes use coaches to help them surpass even the great things they are currently achieving. Outstanding business leaders regularly use coaches to extend their success too, take a look at this you tube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PclmUyPqqpo

Make sure coaching becomes the way you do business and is made available to all people within the organisation either as formal 1:1 session or as a style of management.

2.     Modern day training and development does not live within the classroom

Thousands of pounds and thousands of man hours have been spent on typical classroom-based training. However, this 20th Century development model has been proven to fail in delivering long term and sustainable performance improvement. In my blog on the 70:20:10 training method, I describe methods of how coaching and mentoring can support real time development methods that have dramatic results on staff performance. http://www.salesimprovementservices.com/the-702010-training-model-is-most-effective-for-learners/

Don’t just train your staff, ensure all training and development creates a change in how they do things.

3.     Coaching is demanded as a communication style for all stakeholders

When we talk about communication, it is important to acknowledge that an ability to communicate well, can help you to build positive working relationships with your key stakeholders and this is key to organisational success.

Developing your team communications skills is not just an internal function either, if you can help develop the ability of your key Stakeholders to communicate well you can create an environment where a two-way open and honest dialogue can create the foundation of a great relationship.

We need to be able to develop our workforce, so the organisation can create the conditions that enable collaboration, shared experience, mutual learning and use the shared capability of our teams toward innovation?

By understanding our stakeholder needs we can truly deliver on our corporate goals: https://www.tpacoaching.co.uk/great-conversations-are-the-underpinning-key-to-success

Ensure your people are communicating effectively and as co-creators where safe and healthy conversations are the key to empowering your team to interact with their peers and wider stakeholders and create incredible results collectively.

4. Improve executive presence.

Taking on a new role, increased scope in an existing role, operating in a constantly changing competitive environment - all of these are next level situations for senior managers and leaders according to Scott Eblin in his book, The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success.

He describes managing at the next level and describes the ability of letting go of traditional traits and concentrating on some core leaderships skills which he has gleaned from over 1,000, 360-degree assessments.

Taken from the publication he suggests that the NEXT LEVEL MODEL OF LEADERSHIP PRESENCE consists of three core levels of ability being Personal Presence, Team Presence and Organisational Presence. He then characterises areas to develop and areas that we might need to drop if we are to be successful as a modern-day leader.

Take a look at these articles around this topic at:

https://www.tpacoaching.co.uk/next-level-model-of-leadership-presence

https://www.tpacoaching.co.uk/increasing-executive-presence-might-be-the-key-to-leadership-success

https://www.tpacoaching.co.uk/increasing-executive-presence-might-be-the-key-to-leadership-success-article-3

Ensure your leaders can create the environment where their team are full of “go to people” who can deliver on your objectives and cause.

5.     Reverse mentoring provides a two-way development culture

So, what is reverse mentoring? Reverse mentoring refers to an intervention in which older executives are paired with and mentored by younger employees. I have seen this work well in a recent initiative where younger employees were paired with senior managers to support the senior teams understanding of the cultural shift within the UK toward a more open and diverse range of ethnic backgrounds.

Many of us grey haired executives, now into our late 50’s and early 60’s have probably benefited from mentoring ourselves when we first entered the workplace. In my own circumstance I had a truly inspiring mentor in the mid 1970’s who shared his experience with me. These were mainly from ideas he had received from his own mentor several years earlier, who had no doubt received support and advice from a mentor too .…., get the picture. Many senior managers will have gained inspiration from those who learned skills and developed values from things happening in the early to mid-20th century.

Reverse mentoring can be a fantastic way to inspire the older generation and in parallel provide a truly inspirational way of engaging the younger workforce with the senior executives of an organisation. This gives the younger team members a feeling of importance and belonging whilst supporting the older team to embrace modern values and share such themes with the future leaders.

6. Inbedding a coaching framework to highlight coaching as the thing we do.

Command and control management and leadership is no longer effective in this fast-moving world. People need to be agile and respond to changing conditions on a moment by moment basis. For this they need a different type of management. One that empowers and facilitates.

Creating culture, finding the right people, managing them to do great things and solving problems creatively and systematically are challenges faced by all organizations. Coaching can help your leaders and managers achieve more through their teams by creating culture, specifically through creating coaching cultures by developing a coaching management style which among other things:

·        creates empowerment

·        increases engagement

·        develops people and performance

·        improves creativity

·        raises responsibility in employees

·        avoids confrontation

This is the advantage of creating a coaching culture.

As a coach or mentor working with a coachee or mentee, we need to consider the whole person and not just the skill or behaviour trait identified as the learning objective. We should then agree during an induction phase within the coaching process, how we might measure the impact from several perspectives.

Performance is one area but what about well-being, life balance, health etc. What is the effect of the change/ improvement on peers, line managers, staff that work for the coachee or mentee?

We need to consider then how this is then reported back to the fee payer, if not the coachee?

How is the intervention measured in terms of the success of the organisation or coaching programme if one exists?

A good review process should link performance back to the job role and identify mutual development opportunities that support the job owner so they can be successful in their role. The individual is part of a department that in turn is part of an organisation that in turn is striving to deliver the identified and agreed stakeholder needs.

As part of this management process an organisation might need to consider how coaching and mentoring, along with the other range of support initiatives on offer to the team, is producing the desired effect and results required to meet corporate and stakeholder needs.

To support an organisations endeavors to deliver and maintain an effective coaching environment the *EMCC (The European Mentoring & Coaching Council), have developed a framework of best practice:

(ISMCP) is an independent accreditation awarded to organisations designing, delivering and evaluating mentoring and/or coaching programmes either ‘inhouse’ or externally. It is an integral and essential step on the path to establishing the professional credibility and status of good mentoring and/or coaching programme management, ensuring programmes are:

·        Thoughtfully designed

·        Systematically managed

·        Significantly contributing to the development of participants, strategic drivers of the organisation and wider stakeholder objectives

For more information on the ISMCP award visit: http://www.salesimprovementservices.com/coaching-services/emcc/

*About the EMCC. https://www.emccouncil.org/

The EMCC exists to develop, promote and set the expectation of best practice in mentoring and coaching across Europe and beyond, for the benefit of society.

Moving coaching and mentoring from a stand-alone, and often ad-hoc 1:1 intervention process into a strategic topic will help deliver coaching, mentoring and other training interventions into being part of corporate development in line with corporate objectives.

It will help support other topics such as recruitment, staff retentions, corporate change and stakeholder satisfaction.

It will help your organisation meet the 21st Century business challenges such as economic austerity, recession, social responsibility, organisation agility and help build trust and openness with our stakeholders, an area that seems to have been forgotten by our banks, our politicians and celebrity role models.

It will do so by:

·        Linking coaching and mentoring to business drivers

·        Encouraging everyone in the organisation to participate and thrive from being coached.

·        Provide a structure to promote and make available great coaching and mentoring to all team members.

·        Manage and promote success of coaching and mentoring interventions so it can remain at the heart of organisational values and ethics.