How to Foster a Coaching Culture in Your Company

Does your organization foster a culture of coaching? If not, it could be lagging in market performance, according to the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp). Research from their report Creating a Coaching Culture indicates that companies with a strong organizational focus on coaching outperform their industry competitors.

There are additional benefits as well. According to the report, “a culture of coaching helps individual employees achieve higher goals, teams to operate with greater synergy, and organizations to accelerate their productivity.”

One of my favorite parts of the report is the section that acknowledges that company culture is organic; it grows over time and is the sum of all the collective actions of the people who work at that organization. The seeds of a company’s culture are planted when the company founder and those first employees start to interact, make decisions and create energy around the products/services their company offers. As the company grows, so does its culture. Just as a plant doesn’t appear fully formed at the beginning of its life, time must pass for a company culture (of any sort) to take root.

So, it makes sense that any organization seeking to build “coaching” into the culture will experience growing pains. Creating a coaching culture isn’t as simple as launching an “initiative.” Rather, senior leaders in organizations must have a comprehensive approach to nurture a culture that supports coaching at all levels of the organization.  i4cp’s report highlights four key aspects needed for companies to successfully instill coaching:

– View the act of coaching as everyone’s job

– Use coaching to transfer knowledge

– Find an executive who will champion the act of coaching

– Hold managers accountable for providing coaching

Senior leaders who read this report will discover that even though organizational culture is an evolutionary process, there are specific, actionable steps they can take to begin the journey of fostering more coach-like elements in their daily practices.