So you think you know what a coaching culture is?

Photo: Tim Hawkes

Tim Hawkes, Managing Director, Unlimited Potential inform, "Coaching cultures is a subject in growth. More and more leader, HR and development practitioners are asking for a coaching culture within their organisations. The reason for this is a matter for debate, but growing evidence, including from to the ICF, demonstrates that coaching improves individual performance and increases employee engagement."

Photo: TrainingZone

The concept of getting more from your people and avoiding recruitment costs is very compelling, and by extending that to a whole culture the results could be extraordinary.

So what is a coaching culture? 
Defining a coaching culture is the starting point for any organisation, in fact there are three questions that organisations need to ask prior to starting on a coaching culture process.

• What is a coaching culture for our organisation?
• What will success look like?
• Where are we now?

This article focuses on the first question - what is a coaching culture?

It is important for us to define coaching culture, as without an understanding of what it is we cannot create a strategy.

There is one easy way of defining a coaching culture, which is what I consider to be the 'avoiding the issue' definition. The following are actual examples of coach culture definitions that don't deliver a good definition.

A coaching culture is:

• A place where coaching is the default for all managers
• An environment where coaching is used as the main method of management
• A culture in which each member of the organisation understands and actively demonstrates coaching behaviours and characteristics so that it becomes a way of being
• Where coaching is the predominant style of managing and working together, and where a commitment to grow the organisation is embedded in a parallel commitment to grow the people in the organisation (Clutterbuck and Megginson (2005))
• Where coaching is part of the everyday work of all staff

Whilst academically accurate and unarguable, if there is a misunderstanding of what coaching is they fail at the first hurdle.
Read more...

Source: TrainingZone