Building a coaching culture in your organisation

Last week I read this fascinating interview with Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee in the Indian Express that talked about how even a decade ago, India did not even possess the words to talk about basic mental health challenges.

Coaching is a bit at the same place in India at the moment. Often mixed up with counselling or even more frequently, for

mentoring, there is a lot of confusion about how coaching works in an organisation distinctly from mentoring. We need the right words to describe coaching and what it can do in an organisation. The best way to find these words and benefits is to build a strong coaching culture in your organisation. Some suggestions:

Coaching Conversation: Train leaders at all levels of the organisation in coaching

The best way to build a coaching culture is to train leaders at various levels of your organisation in coaching. This would enable them to conduct a two-way coaching conversation with their teams and build an atmosphere where work challenges can be a discussion with the mindset of empowering professionals to build their own solutions.

Make coaching a priority not an afterthought

Embed coaching in the learning and development programme of the organisation. Coaching provides keys for the individual to unlock their problem-solving ability at work. Distinct from mentoring and training the answers are not provided by another person, but the space to find your own solutions are.

Set up internal coaching ambassadors

Once you have trained coaches in-house, they can act like brand ambassadors that can empower others to have caching conversations. To be clear, am not suggesting that every person in the organisation should be trained as a coach, but a core of trained coaches can help put in place a culture that values a coaching conversation approach to problem-solving. A coaching conversation is where the coach supports the client in discovering their strengths to solve vexing issues at work and hold them accountable for reaching the goals they set for themselves.

You may well ask, why does it matter so much to have a coaching culture, here are 3 reasons why:

Move past the recession, pandemic mindset

We are living in an uncertain world, more uncertain than we have faced in the nearly 80 decades since we gained freedom and since the Second World War. Technology, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the global recession all add to the existential anxiety we all well. This has led to situations such as quiet quitting, resistance to full work at the office, and quiet hiring. Coaching acts like preventive medicine in dealing with these challenges and helps the most important stakeholders in an organisation to feel and perform better: that is, the employees.

Meeting DeI commitments

A strong coaching culture helps teams better appreciate the DeI goals of an organisation. DeI is a behavioural change for an organisation. Coaching is the best way to ensure organisational behaviour change towards DeI.

Helping leaders in a VUCA World

Never in the history of humankind have leaders been more challenges to navigate the complexities of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity - VUCA. Leadership coaching, with its emphasis on the long-term and sustained empowerment of the leader/client is one of the best ways to prepare leaders to respond with resilience.