Building a coaching culture is imperative for modern organizations of today in the face of the generational shift wherein more millennials are entering the workforce and a productivity crisis that is looming large.

Building a coaching culture today is starkly different from coaching that we generally and traditionally know of. Coaching generally is viewed as remedial help and support given to people or instructing them on the way forward (what to do, what to say, how to do, etc.). It is a top-down approach that was used widely in workplaces to ‘correct’ or remediate performance related issues of employees. Only top level and C-suite leaders were included in these efforts and these leaders would use the methods to remediate their immediate reports’ performance.

As mentioned earlier, the younger workforce of today, especially, the millennials demand different things from the workplace in terms of strategies, management, leadership, their own development – personally and professionally and so on. Therefore, the command style leadership and functioning do not work today to address the productivity crisis and labor shortages that are expected to continue for the next decade and longer. Building a coaching culture is essential to deal with these crises and to maximize the productivity of the workforce.

Building a coaching culture in today’s modern workplaces: What does it mean?

• - Supporting employees to build their capacity and learn new skills.
• - Enabling employees to solve challenges through deeper awareness and consciousness of their values
• - Equipping employees to explore their full potential and become invaluable assets to the organization, assets who are not dispensable.
• - Empowering employees to have authentic, unique and fulfilling experiences and thereby, successfully completing work.

By building a strong coaching culture, organizations not only develop an engaged and productive workforce but also develop a pipeline of leaders outside the leadership and management positions and at all levels of the organization. Such leaders do not discount the value of learning from other employees (whether direct reports or peers, not just seniors and managers) and learn from and help each other grow, professionally and personally. There is a shared leadership rooted in the values of collaboration and cooperation.

A strong coaching culture revolutionizes internal communication in the organization, promoting effective meaningful, multi-way communication, active listening, proactive participation and seamless flow of real-time feedback. These, in turn, promote the real-time development of all the employees including the management.

In the face of the increasing volatility and dynamism in the business environment, change has become the only constant. One of the biggest HR and organizational challenges is change management – equipping the workforce for the forthcoming changes and enabling them to seize opportunities that come. With a strong coaching culture in practice, organizations can effectively manage changes with the requisite agility and develop strategic edges for themselves.

The accelerated development of technology, especially HR Tech, is enabling organizations to build a coaching culture and achieve agility in effectively managing changes in an efficiently, speedy and cost-effective manner at scale.

How to build a strong coaching culture?

• » Focus on the foundation - It is key to understand why coaching is important to the organization, what are the objectives of coaching, what problems should coaching address, what are the expected outcomes, etc. To this end, organizational assessments must be conducted.
• » Develop a clear coaching strategy along with clear goals that are well-aligned to the overall business strategy and goals.
• » Embed coaching into the organizational culture as it is a continuous process – a part of everyday life and not an end-goal that can be checked off a list.
• » Identify and leverage technology that will create a conducive environment for a coaching culture to thrive within the organization.
• » Train internal coaches to ask lots of right questions that put the employee in the driver’s seat and gain deeper insights into the situation while trying to unpack and answer the questions.
• » Identify key influencers within the organization to experience the power of coaching first-hand and convey their experiences and benefits to the others. This helps in reducing resistance and in easier onboarding.

Join us at the SHRM-SAP SuccessFactors Webcast to hear the Ola story and gain a deeper understanding of how they built a strong coaching culture and its impact on their business outcomes.