Establishing a coaching culture

Many business commentators see coaching as a key to business success in an increasingly tight labour market.  Gone are the days when an easy option was to ‘fire and re-hire’ when faced with sub-par performance. Increasingly, managers have found themselves left with few choices but to make the best of what they’ve got. This has brought ‘coaching’ to the fore as organisations reassess their need to better align and motivate individuals with organisational goals and objectives.

Nicola Blum from Talent Solutions recently reconfirmed the fact that such alignment and motivation requires more than simply building coaching capability. As we often find, organisations can develop the knowledge and skills within their leadership ranks, however, establishing a coaching culture requires a more holistic approach than simply delivering skills-based workshops to managers and front-line staff.

Our recent experience with a large national organisation found a senior executive with a clear mandate to improve the communication, cooperation and collaboration within his department.  Recently arrived, the executive found a department characterised by a highly technical focus with little by the way of genuine discussion and one-to-one dialogue. Somewhat frustrated by this lack of communication he was keen to establish a ‘coaching culture’ to encourage more active involvement by all towards a more open and collaborative environment within the department.

He decided that all staff needed to understand the concepts and benefits of creating a coaching culture for long term change to occur. Talent Solutions was engaged to deliver a one-day coaching workshop to all 60 managers and staff. During the initial consultation it was recognised that training in coaching knowledge and skills alone would not bring about the desired cultural change. Hence, it was decided to simultaneously facilitate a data gathering process to explore and define the critical success factors for establishing an appropriate coaching culture within the department.

The thoughts and ideas of staff were overwhelmingly consistent. Some of their suggestions included:

• Establishing regular one-to-one meetings between managers and staff as an essential ‘first step’ to creating a culture where two-way dialogue is the ‘norm’.
• Having managers as ‘coaches’ was widely accepted as a good idea. However staff felt it was also important to recognise times when coaching was inappropriate, for example, when a quick decision was needed or when on-the-job ‘technical’ training was more appropriate.
• In addition to having managers as coaches most expressed an appetite for a more structured coaching process that involved a coach other than a person’s manager. In cases like these they suggested there be clear guidelines around the coaching relationship, for example:
  • Coaching should be voluntary
  • Coaching should offer an overall framework for both parties without being too prescriptive
  • Staff should be able to source coaches from anywhere within the organisation
  • It should be open to all staff
  • Coaches didn’t have to be more senior than those being coached
• In terms of implementing a ‘coaching system’, they felt that:
  • A process for identifying coaches, staff seeking coaches as well as a way to match them together would be needed
  • Establishing a ‘panel’ of coaches that staff can choose from would be effective
  • Further development for coaches to ensure they are ‘up to the job’ would be advantageous
  • An evaluation after a set period of time was critical

What was clearly evident after the workshops was a strong sense of understanding of both the theory and the benefits of establishing a coaching culture. The department has now started implementing some of these ideas and is well on the way to establishing an environment that embraces coaching as a way to enhance staff motivation and commitment to delivering business results. 

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the ability to achieve effective interpersonal outcomes by recognising and modifying the emotions of oneself and others.

The EI abilities that drive leadership effectiveness include:

Interpersonal sensitivity: the ability to ‘put yourself in someone else’s shoes’ and display behaviours that suggest agreement and shared understanding.

Emotional self-awareness: the ability to recognise your feelings and the confidence to manage and control their impact.

Emotional resilience: the ability to perform consistently when under pressure.

Intuitiveness: the ability to make clear decisions when faced with incomplete, ambiguous and emotional information.

Influence: the ability to persuade others to change their point of view, adopt a certain interpretation or agree to a particular course of action. 

Motivation: the drive and energy to achieve clear results and make an impact.

Conscientiousness: the ability to display a clear commitment to a course of action.

The ability to quickly establish rapport and build an ongoing relationship is fundamental to leadership success, particularly in complex assignments involving ambiguity, uncertainty and staff or stakeholder resistance (eg. passive-aggressive behaviours commonly experienced during organisational change).

Relationship building happens in every interaction and during each stage of managing a team or a project, yet the ‘relationship building’ skills most commonly taught to leaders emphasise personal appearance, listening, questioning and organising skills. For example, dressing well, smiling, a firm handshake, small talk, nodding, paraphrasing and using open and closed questions. 

Consider someone who has the seemingly natural ability to put someone at ease, they strike up a comfortable conversation and don’t appear to be forcing you into anything. Contrast this with the novice who can often come across as following a script, or perhaps as insincere or even pushy. You might feel like you haven’t been listened to, or worse still the victim of an interrogation. Leaders with high levels of interpersonal sensitivity (or empathy) excel in relationship building. They have the ability to ‘put themselves in someone else’s shoes’ and display behaviours that suggest agreement and shared understanding. Interpersonal sensitivity is concerned with understanding both verbal and non-verbal messages with a particular focus on the emotional content. Leaders high in interpersonal sensitivity can readily interpret someone’s values, perspectives, fears and aspirations.  Good listening and questioning skills provide you the raw data, but interpersonal sensitivity helps you unlock the meaning.

Interpersonal sensitivity also provides the leader with vital information that informs their decision making process. Intuitiveness is the ability to make clear decisions when faced with incomplete, ambiguous and emotional information. A leader high in interpersonal sensitivity understands both the rational and emotional perceptions of key issues that impact a staff member, internal stakeholder, or client. This facilitates quick decision making and often describes leaders who are able to think on their feet, are street smart or have a gut instinct. The very term gut instinct describes the emotional response one gets when they are confident in a decision. People don’t always say what they feel, leaders high in interpersonal sensitivity and intuitiveness are able to read between the lines and make the best decisions for both the individual and their organisation.

For many, leading and managing can be a high pressure occupation. Timelines can be tight, it takes time to learn about a client’s business or a staff member’s issues, and some people aren’t always cooperative, friendly or easily influenced. Add to this the pressure to meet organisational objectives and those occasional implementation hiccups outside your control and one can quickly begin to feel overwhelmed. Such events can be distracting and can have a major impact on the leader’s ability to stay focused, develop relationships and influence others. We all know people who respond well to pressure and those who don’t. Leaders with high emotional self-awareness have the ability to recognise their feelings and the confidence to manage and control their impact. This is a critical EI ability since low self-awareness is the most common factor contributing to strained relationships. Experienced leaders often recall examples of colleagues who have clearly become frustrated with others during a meeting but will strongly deny this afterwards.    

Repeated exposure to challenging leadership situations can evoke strong emotions, for example, rejection can reduce self-confidence and increase anxiety sometimes leading to avoidance behaviour, criticism can fuel feelings of frustration or anger, and losing your manager’s confidence can be demoralising.  Such emotional responses are normal, however, when they occur with increasing frequency, duration and intensity they can begin to impact individual leadership effectiveness. Such environments require leaders high in emotional resilience which is the ability to perform consistently when under pressure. Effective leaders are constantly self-monitoring for any signs of emotional damage. When affected, they can modify their behaviour on the spot to maintain relationships and work towards a constructive outcome. Those with low self-awareness or emotional resilience often let their emotions get the better of them and become a real liability to their team.  Most of us can recall at least one example where a leader was removed from an assignment because of a perceived ‘personality clash’ with someone else.

The ability to effectively influence others goes to the heart of leadership. Leaders high in this ability are experts at persuading others to change their point of view, adopt a certain interpretation or agree to a particular course of action.  Most would recognise this as the essence of leadership – all leaders need to influence to be effective. Accordingly, influence is a foundation or base-level EI ability.  Rarely does it distinguish seasoned professionals from those new to leadership. Likewise, motivation, the drive and energy to achieve clear results and make an impact, and conscientiousness, the ability to display a clear commitment to a course of action, are needed by all leaders but alone do not distinguish high performers from average performers.