How to Create a Coaching Culture in 4 Proven Steps

Do You Want to Create a Coaching Culture?
Smart leaders learn how to create a coaching culture as part of their overall  talent management strategy.

We know from our best places to work employee engagement survey research that 85% of highly disengaged employees don’t receive enough coaching from their boss.   We also know employees who prefer coaching from direct managers as a form of professional development are 5.6 percentage points more engaged than those who don’t want coaching.

Make Coaching Part of Your Workplace Culture
In order for coaching to be an accepted, relevant, and effective form of employee performance improvement, it needs to be ingrained into your organizational culture. Think of coaching as an ongoing organization-wide program, a cultural element that drives your internal people operations and the success of your business.

Here are four proven ways to create a coaching culture.

1.  Provide Training to Coaches and Coachees
Giving and receiving feedback are both underappreciated and underdeveloped skills. Without any guidance, feedback is likely to be given poorly by the coach and misconstrued by the employee. Support effective coaching training in your organization by providing effective feedback training and resources organization-wide.

2.  Set The Tone From The Top
Like any element you want to make part of your day-to-day culture, a coaching culture starts at the top. Effective coaching must be modeled. Your leaders and managers must:

• Hone performance coaching skills and set the example.
• Ask for feedback
• Visibly receive feedback well.
• Do it, and do it again and again.

3. Communicate Coaching Expectations
If giving and receiving feedback well is a quality leadership seeks, it must be made clear. Communicate, and communicate often. Set organizational expectations around what manager and peer coaching looks like in your organization:

• Who gives feedback?
• Who receives feedback?
• How often does feedback occur?
• How do we provide effective feedback?
• What is the goal of a coaching session?

Make coaching part of your processes and traditions, from new employee on-boarding and appraisals to everyday conversations.

4.  Leverage Tools to Streamline Coaching
Leverage the tools and technology available to you to fully ingrain coaching into your culture.  Utilize software and tools to:

• Support powerful leader conversations and employee career-growth ownership
• Facilitate one-on-one coaching sessions
• Save and reference detailed notes, coaching tools and job-aids

Technology can make coaching less complicated for employees and managing the entire initiative easier for you.

The Bottom Line
When employees are pushed to learn and develop and are coached on their performance, they’ll be more equipped to do their job, more motivated to go the extra mile, and more likely to produce high-quality results. In fact, organizations with employees who are coached effectively and frequently improve their business results by 21%, compared to those who don’t coach employees

Want to take your coaches to the next level to create a coaching culture?  Download The Top Coaching Mistakes – Is What You Learned All Wrong?