Coaching Culture or Coaching Program?

2 August 2021

Many organizations claim that they are coaching-culture organizations. They thought that creating and implementing a coaching program for leaders and employees will make them a coaching-culture organization. So the next questions are, Is your organization building a coaching program or a coaching culture? How does your coaching program contribute to building a coaching culture?

Running coaching programs for managers does not guarantee the success of a coaching culture. Coaching initiatives have to fully cascade down from the managers to all employees through coaching conversations and a coaching awareness campaign driven by the coaching COE

“Coaching Culture Comes from Three Ways”

A coaching culture has to be driven from three directions. These are the top-down approach, bottom-up approach, and middle-out approach.

For the top-down approach, Senior VP/directors are responsible for working closely with the coaching COE team to support and drive coaching awareness within the organization. With permission granted from the top, middle managers are provided a safe environment to practice coaching conversations safely with their direct reports and demonstrate coach-leader behaviours (middle-out approach) to further reinforce the commitments contributed by the senior leaders.

The bottom line of a coaching culture will still be the first line of employees, the individual contributors who impact the coaching culture from the bottom up. All employees will eventually be trusted and empowered, their potential unlocked to drive optimized performance and to deliver business results.

In the real business world nowadays, practicing the middle-out approach is the key strategy in corporate change as they will be tasked to lead the project that involves creating an influence on multiple stakeholders. To quote Peter Hawkins in his book, “Culture change can be sanctioned from the top, but needs to be driven in the middle of the organization – the leaders of tomorrow.”

So, which direction are you focusing to drive your culture change? how would you supplement you coaching/leadership program to organizational change?