How to Create a Coaching Culture

This book is geared toward HR professionals and upper management that drives the direction of the company. Unfortunately, I am neither of these. When I read the blurb, I thought this book was focused on being a coach. As I started reading the book, I realized my mistake. I already work at a company with a strong coaching culture. The parts that I did read felt very familiar to what I experience daily. If you are an HR professional that wants more information about a coaching culture, I would recommend this book. However, if you are a professional that is learning to be a coach, this does not have that focus.

A very interesting and useful books, full of examples and tool. I'm starting to work on the coaching of people and I found a lot of information that can help me to improve the way I work.
Recommended!
Many thanks to Kogan Page and Netgalley for this ARC

I confess - I am not an HR professional, but I have been taking courses in leadership & management all year so was very interested in this topic. I thought that this book would be a quick read -- I was quite wrong!

The authors have provided an incredibly detailed, thoughtful, comprehensive and well structured discussion around culture, coaching at different levels, employee life-cycle and change management.

The basic premise here is that people have the ability to solve most of their own problems, and given the support or empowerment, will do so. "[A]utonomy, mastery and purpose, and these factors are the foundation blocks of empowerment and so too of engagement."

Employee engagement is critical for high performance -- engaged, fulfilled employees do better work, take initiative and work harder. Key factors of disengagement include. "1. Not feeling respected. 2 Not respecting their manager. 3 Not feeling valued. 4 Having their ideas discounted. 5 Goals and expectations unclear. 6 Organizational values not being lived. 7 Manager not encouraging team work/collaboration. 8 Personal expression not valued. 9 Lack of empowerment. 10 No useful or constructive feedback."

Coaching culture helps people feel engaged, connected, respected and gain the confidence they need to make things happen via discussions with a coach, vis a vis a model identified as GROW (Goal Reality Options Will) early in the book.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, coaching is seen as a privilege and training is seen as the only form of development. Training, however, is transactional while coaching is ongoing development that happens over time. Many managers don't have "time" to devote to managing their employees and "chicken out" of the actual coaching tasks, resulting in a lot of organizations that talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.

"Every phone conversation, meeting, written report, process followed provides an opportunity for coaching, and when this mindset is achieved, then employees welcome the opportunity to have short discussions with their manager about what they are doing that is right and what could be done differently."

The authors point out that "culture" has only been in use in organizational behavior discussions the last 20 years or so, and they define it as: "the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organization’s view of itself and its environment."

When vision is cloudy and employees don't connect the work they are doing with the mission, goals and values of the company -- this is a good opportunity for making a change by clearly articulating values, strategy and vision and linking that to all the roles in your company. Don't use coaching as a way of "fixing" problem employees: "Creating a climate for coaching works better when you are looking to inspire high performance rather than mitigate poor performance."

The book walks through how to create a business case for a coaching culture -- including identifying sub-groups or teams where it is most likely to succeed (ie, they are using some coaching practices already). A 100-day plan is outlined as an example for implementing steps toward building a coaching culture.

Each chapter includes lists of thoughtful questions to guide change managers in developing their own map of the organization and plan for requirements for their constituents. There's a solid discussion on the difference between finding internal coaches and external coaches at the executive level, and how to manage the needs of the organization against the needs of the individual in the coaching process.

My chief take-away from the book is an outline of the process that the book describes:

"Ten stages of a coaching culture

Learn
1. Understand organization
2. Link to organizational objectives and strategy
Assess current reality
Validate the need for change

Define
3. Identify vision and purpose
4. Gain management support
Define a destination goal for culture
Focus on win-win

Create
5. Isolate where to engage first
6. Create measurements
Identify low-risk area to experiment
Clarify what success means
Identify how ROI will be measured

Experiment
7. Introduce pilot
8. Evaluate results and publish–Visual Wall
Identify learning and insights
Decide how you will act on the learning and insights

Learn
9. Introduce the next phase
10. Maintain momentum health check
Celebrate small wins
Implement actions from insights
Iterate and improve "

You need this book! The lists of questions and tools provide amazing basis for developing your own organization. Highly recommend this for anyone interested in the subject of organizational change, coaching and leadership.