Creating a high performance coaching culture

Submitted by manager on Fri, 2011-09-23 17:42

By Michael Stewart

Leadership coaching isn’t about teaching a leader to do the things they already know, but done better. It is about putting the ball in the hands of his teammates and guiding them to victory.

The recent movie, The Kings Speech, was about the man who became King George VI and how his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, helped him overcome a severe stutter. But it was also about how the therapist (coach) helped King George VI believe in himself so he could overcome his limitations. Through coaching, King George VI learned to trust himself, thereby overcoming his stutter.

Hundreds of King George’s out there

King George VI wasn’t a poor leader. He just lacked the confidence to be a leader because everyone doubted him and it manifested itself through a speech impediment.

Within any corporate environment, there are hundreds of King George VIs just waiting to emerge: all it will take is the proper coaching. Yet, too often, organizations simply assign an internal manager to an employee to coax them into doing their job better. This isn’t coaching but skills training.

Effective leadership coaching starts with the right culture and a supportive upper management that believes that it brings value to the organization. It also requires that coaching not be limited to senior executives only, but be pushed downward throughout the organization. That is the only way to create a coaching culture.

According to the UK-based Institute of Leadership and Management study Creating a Coaching Culture, “coaching is a particularly powerful tool in the modern workplace – one that has proven to be a highly effective way of developing individual and organizational performance by unlocking capability.”

Coaching for leadership is about creating a culture that, through its leaders, will achieve a high level of performance. It is not about job training, skills development or getting a new certification. It is about helping a leader be a better motivator, mentor and change leader.

Too often an organization’s goals trump an individual’s goals, leaving the individual to fend for him/herself. Although an organization’s goals are quite important, leadership development coaching focuses on individual development, and in turn, organizational development.

To facilitate a coaching culture an organization must help the individual leader improve in some very important areas: as communicators, in conflict resolution, interpersonal skills, and management abilities. In other words, it must build confidence.

It’s about the individual, not the organization

What isn’t a focus in leadership development coaching are organizational priorities like productivity and profitability. These are indirectly achieved through an individual’s improved leadership abilities.

In 2009, the International Coach Federation Global Coaching Client Study found that “the vast majority (86 per cent) of those (clients) able to calculate company ROI (Return on Investment) indicated that their company had at least made their money back . . .and the median company return was 700 per cent”.

The biblical adage “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” is quite apt even in the workplace. An effective coach, working within a coaching culture, will help a leader achieve far more than if the leader was left to learn it from a book. In the elusive search for better ROI, a leadership coaching culture will go a long way to achieving an organization’s objectives.

Michael Stewart is the managing partner of Work Effects, a Minneapolis, MN based human resources and management consultancy that helps organizations build better leaders and more trustworthy organizations through unique training, coaching and assessment programs. He can be reached at: info@work-effects.com.

SOURCE: Troy Media