Coaching essential skills training for c-suit and managers has become an innovative intervention for fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies across the globe. Modeling a corporate coaching culture goes a long way to creating an effective collaborative team spirit and high performance.
The just ended 2021 HR Congress World Summit sponsored by International Coaching Federation – ICF brought about the untenable importance of companies’ coaching skills and culture, which rises and falls on coaching or coached leadership. “The world is rapidly changing, HR professionals need to build a coaching culture that nurtures change management, mental health, leadership, diversity.” – Magda Nowicka Mook, ICF CEO. Integration of a coaching culture is a powerful tool and intervention for the new normal the world is living through and very strategic for growth in developing countries.
The opportunity of the Post Covid Pandemic
Quantum being, as I call it, explains that challenges on their own are not blockades, but it is what we choose to see within the challenge and what we introduce to the challenge that either makes it a siege or stepping stone. So, for example, the pandemic’s pain also gave us the desire to shift from the mechanistic era, which gave birth to all machines’ development and usage between the first to the fourth industrial revolution to ecological beingness where we have started asking questions about our wellbeing humanness.
We are now focusing on how we feel, agency in the corporate world as employees, and transformational leadership focusing on coordinating with people and managing people who get the job done. Allyship and mentoring have become very critical for human resource development across the board.
Let me paraphrase Simon Sinek, “the primary responsibility of C-suite and managers is to manage the people who get the job done, stimulate the people who run the policies and innovation, and employees who anchor the Company’s mission, vision, and values, etc.”. The era of robotic-like instructions and orders is over. Instead, leadership must realize that humans are rational to think, emotional to feel, and instinctual to experience. And this particular awareness is backed by neuroplasticity and wellbeing.
There are a lot of reports such as Development Dimensions International’s DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2021, World Health Organization, International Labour Organization, etc. establish that leadership across the globe suffered severe burnouts, depression, and lack of optimistic cognitive deployment, unhealed emotionalities, etc., at the back of the pandemic. In one report, leadership across best practices have identified the need for external personal coaching and resilience coaching as well as external training to retool them
This is why a burned-out C-suite and managers are critical against the growth and performance of every Company.
As c-suites desire coaching as an essential integration for personal wellbeing and performance, they also need some essential skills to facilitate some level of coaching for the line managers, supervisors, and team leaders to function to a degree of high performance as the world crawls back into winnings ways in a new normal.
This makes it mission-critical that every Company’s leaders worth their salt sign onto coaching at least ten sessions every year. Moreover, it affords such leaders space to be held accountable and responsible for their actions and inactions towards personal growth, development, and wellbeing. The coaching space evolves the beingness required for the leader or manager to function effectively for impact and productivity. A leader or manager offering coaching for their corporate subordinates whiles signed unto sessions with a professional becomes an agent of corporate transformation.
Sustaining a Corporate Coaching Culture: The ontological “Be-Do-Have” modeling considers corporate culture a collection of beingness in diversity, inclusion, and equitable interventive and integrated environment where employee-focused leadership style is deployed. As a result, a coaching culture is a plugin to augment an existing corporate culture. Coaching evokes and stimulates employee feel and experience, which supports learning-unlearning-relearning, applying new skills, and becoming more excellent assets to the organization with high regard for their wellbeing and work-life balance.
John Mattone, a business and leadership coach of late Steve Jobs, once said, “One of the best ways a business can instill a coaching culture is for one or more top leaders to engage a coach (or coaches) for themselves. That way, top leadership can experience for themselves how coaching empowers and takes skills to a higher level.
The following is my suggested sequence of cultivating a corporate coaching culture,
The first step to creating a coaching culture in a corporate body is by
(1) C-suites and managers coaching skills training: giving c-suites and managers top-notch coaching essential training by an accredited and experienced coaching training organization or individual.
(2) Professional continuous coaching for c-suite and managers: C-suites and managers embark on their personal sponsored coaching journey to high engineering levels of allyship, effective communication, peak performance, and career satisfaction.
(3) C-suite and Managers coaching management: These trained cum coachees c-suites and managers engage the expert coach to introduce to the would-be Company coachees the importance of coaching for their personal and career growth, shifting teams to extraordinary teams, and linear performance to peak performance with work-life-balance and holistic or 360 life satisfaction.
(4) Professional Teams or subordinate Coaching: Exercise professional team coaching through a structured calendar of how the c-suites and managers would create the space for coaching for the employees and run it with a monitoring and evaluation mechanism.
(5) Allyship and mentoring practice: This is the point where c-suites and managers deploy the top to down employee relationship to mentor and support employee personal cum career growth and company development through coaching.
By cultivating a coaching culture starting from the c-suite and managerial line, they become role or career models for their departments and teams to follow. They become a better case study to have the second and third layer of leadership trained in coaching skills so that most employees could experience coaching for the holistic corporate growth like it has become common in many fortune 100 companies.
The benefits of coaching culture to the corporate world
The business world has been professionally researched as VUCA’R’ (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous and Resilience) in the 21st century and beyond. The changes occurring swiftly demand human resources, especially c-suites and managers, to be tooled with the skills needed in such a business environment.
- V- volatility: The managers in charge develop a level of versatility in such moments to respond to challenges because, to these trained leaders, challenges are embedded with opportunities. Such a state of being come by training and behavioral shift.
- U-uncertainty: When companies hit a crossroad, there is the need for unified thoughts, feelings, and intuition to unlock the possibilities that the said uncertainty presents. A company with such leadership leads companies to profitability even in the face of a crawling pandemic.
- C-complexity: In the moments of challenges, creativity emerges through c-curiosity; leadership with a certain degree of coaching skills are very curious in their dealings, allowing them to stimulate creativity and innovation.
- A-ambiguity: C-Suites and Managers with relevant coaching skills create a presence that breeds focus and allows a-adaptability for development and clarity of design.
- R-resilience: Ontological coaching supports leadership to forge a sense of congruency and authenticity to deploy versatility, unification of thoughts, feelings, & intuition; creativity through curiosity and adaptability to produce sterling results during turbulence in business and production.
Coaching culture benefits for C-suites and managers
- It sharpens their awareness and observational abilities in-side-out: one of the most significant benefits for coachees is awareness and the ability to observe a situation from 360 degrees angles. In addition, it offers the leader the skill to explore cases all-rounded before decisions are made.
- It creates a level of consciousness of their languaging and wording for growth and development: Creation is said to occur through words. The same can be said about corporate growth and stagnation. Through coaching or coaching skills acquisition, leaders become mindful of how powerful words or communication are, either verbal or non-verbal, allowing them to create possibilities rather than chaos.
- Offer them an approach to challenges to promote their wellbeing and quality work-life balance: Choice and decision-making become a feel and thought-through experience before it is executed by a leader who goes through coaching sessions or coaching skills training. Choices get grounded in personal vision and mission by integrating the Company’s corporate values, objectives, vision, mission, etc. Such produces impressive results.
- Get skilled in consciously shifting old attitudes into results and satisfying beingness: Coaching creates awareness about attitudes that retrogress life dreams and the ones that facilitate the progression of life aspiration. Such awareness is what defines the choices leaders make.
- Promote the evocation of the kind of coach-leadership style and attribute that augment peak performance: Leadership has become just more than personality traits and acquired skills; it is more or less an integrative adventure encapsulating so many factors such as employees, environment, competition, collaboration, share/stakeholders interest, etc. Coaching holds the space for leaders to trigger inspiration in service to humans through their responsibilities.
Coaching culture impact on employees
- Peak Performance: when leaders, through coaching, breed a sense of belief in employees through allyship and mentoring, employees forge a deep sense of pride to work towards results.
- Trust culture stimulation: Trust is a commodity that builds a higher mountain of goodwill, dedication, and willingness to go the extra mile. This sense of trust and knowing leaders can entrust growth in their hands causes employees to be very innovative.
- Personal initiative and creativity drive: Embodying creativity to initiate personal growth and corporate development can be achieved through coaching. The leader instills a sense of inspiration and motivation by asking powerful questioning. When an employee’s welfare and personal growth matters to a leader, it evokes creativity.
- Teamwork and cohesion: Sense of unity and collective drive for success creates team spirit that birth authorship of company ideas and programs
- Change adaptability: Managing change in most organizations is one of the challenging moments, but when a coaching culture is imbibed, the fear of the unknown and lack of trust are eliminated to make change malleable.
- Effective listening and productive languaging: An organization where active and effective listening is a culture turn to breed efficiency and strong customer experience with clarity of understanding and vision.
- Coordination, collaboration, and contribution: Employees can explore possibilities to contribute effectively and forge more vital partnerships to produce outstanding results with an influential coaching culture.
Establishing a coaching culture through deliberate HR policy implementation reinforces corporate values and objectives, which indicate that their wellbeing, welfare, and work-life balance are crucial for their companies. Leaders who spearhead such coaching culture can embody what they are modeling and become a direct mirror of growth and development. As a result, companies become resilient to business turbulence and sail through change management when the need arises.
The writer is a Transformational Coach | Certified Professional Corporate Trainer | Lead Consultant for Zoweh Global Consult|
Contact: +233-243-085-932, email: [email protected]
