How to Create a Coaching Culture in 5 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 to attract, develop, engage, and retain high performers.

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 how work gets done in your organizational culture. Think of coaching as an ongoing and organization-wide program, a cultural element that drives your internal people operations and the success of your business.

Proven Ways to Create a Coaching Culture

1. Provide Training to Coaches and Coachees
   Giving and receiving feedback are both underappreciated and underdeveloped skills at work. Without proper guidance, feedback is likely to be given poorly by the coach and misconstrued by the employee. Support effective coaching training across your organization.
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 360 feedback, visibly receive feedback well, do it, and, like most things, do it again and again.
3. Communicate Coaching Expectations
   If giving and receiving feedback well is a quality that  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 by answering questions like:

   — Who gives feedback?
   — Who receives feedback?
   — How often should feedback occur?
   — What constitutes effective feedback?
   — What is the goal of a coaching session?

   The idea is to make coaching part of your processes and traditions, from new employee on-boarding and appraisals to everyday conversations.

4. Embed Coaching in Key Talent Management Processes
   Wherever it makes sense, integrate targeted coaching tools, approaches, and expectations into your career development, employee engagement, retention, learning, and performance management processes.  Not only does this increase exposure, but it also increases results.

   According to Gallup, companies that incorporate coaching into their key talent management processes saw up to a 19% increase in sales, 29% increase in profits, 7% higher customer engagement, 15% increase in employee engagement, and 59% fewer safety incidents.

5. Leverage Tools to Streamline Coaching
   Leverage tools and technology to fully ingrain coaching into your culture.  Utilize software to support and facilitate one-on-one coaching sessions about goals, career development, and performance.  Technology can make coaching less complicated for employees and managing the entire initiative easier for you.

You will know you are on the right path when a coaching mindset and coaching practices become part of how work gets done throughout the organization.  Evidence of success looks like people at all levels frequently:

• Requesting, giving, and receiving effective feedback
• Challenging, stretching, and supporting each other’s thinking
• Having development oriented conversations and plans

The Bottom Line
When employees are properly coached to learn and raise 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.

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?