Does your organizational culture inspire employees to jump out of bed on Monday morning and race to the office because they can’t wait to get there or do your employees have to drag themselves out of bed at the last minute looking for excuses not to come in? If it’s the latter, you may want to consider the merits of instilling a “coaching culture” into the organizational DNA.

Being intentional about your organization’s culture and developing a strong one is the only true competitive advantage an organization has today. In recent years, leading organization have embraced the idea of a “coaching culture” as a means to motivate employees to perform at their highest level of competency to achieve impactful and profitable results, both personally and professionally.

“To create a high performance team, we must replace typical management activities like supervision, monitoring and controlling with new behaviors like coaching and communicating.”  

                                                                                                                                                            -Ray Smith, CEO Bell Atlantic

When to Coach:

• Leadership Development Coaching – When an employee is currently performing well in a leadership role and wants to grow and develop to achieve even higher levels of excellence or “high potentials” who have been identified for future leadership growth opportunities.
• Development Coaching – When an employee wants to proactively prepare for future opportunities in a new role or position
• Performance Coaching – When an employee has a performance deficiency that needs to be corrected before it becomes a show stopper

A coaching culture is present when all employees, regardless of level or status, continuously engage in open, honest coaching conversations to improve their effectiveness and results. Does your organization have a coaching culture? Consider these 3 characteristics to decide:

1. The Leader as Role Model: Intentional leaders establish a compelling and inspiring vision and lead by example – by establishing and communicating expectations, holding themselves and others accountable and engaging in coaching for higher levels of performance as a way of life, they transform themselves and their organizations.
2. Proactively Soliciting Feedback and Coaching: In a coaching culture, all employees actively seek out feedback to enhance their growth, development and performance.
3. Coaching that’s up, down and side to side: In a couching culture, people seek the best feedback available without regard to hierarchy, status or org chart position so that different perspective are evaluated and strong networks are formed and leveraged.

Through the establishment of a coaching culture, organizations can reap many tangible and intangible benefits including:

• Passionate/Engaged Teams – in a coaching culture, team members learn to trust each other. This high level of trust helps the organization
•  Increased Trust/Better Decisions – High trust among team members resulting better decisions and improved results – when employees trust each other and are willing to be vulnerable with each other, they can engage in healthy, unfiltered debate about key business issues. When all factors are put on the table for honest evaluation teams can arrive at better decisions.

Leading organizations have embraced the potential power of coaching. These titans of their industry have discovered coaching in proactive, on-going manner rather than a one-time event (i.e. annual performance appraisals) drive employee engagement and results. They are also beginning to connect-the-dots and extrapolate the incredible power of an organization whose capacity for growth and change is enhanced through the systematic practice of coaching.

The question to ask yourself is this: Do you have employees working for you – you know those people that come to work late leave early and steal while they are there or do you have business partners committed to achieving both personal and professional excellence?