3 Ways Your Leadership Team Can Create a Coaching Culture

NimblyWise Team
May 18, 2022

Forbes is calling 2022 the Year of Workplace Culture. After the past few years, there have been so many immense shifts in how we work that many companies are cultivating a new company culture from scratch with new employees, hybrid and remote work scenarios, and more. Focusing on company culture has a few key factors: DEI, employee recognition, embracing technology and flexibility, and prioritizing employee development. As a company that focuses on employee development, we understand why that is such a huge part of company culture. We’ve shared this stat before, but it’s essential: Ninety-four percent of employees would stay at a company that invested in their career development. Can you imagine the impact on your bottom line and success if you had a team that grew with your company, avoiding costly turnover and retraining? So, what’s one way you can do this more easily? You can create a coaching culture.

Today, we will share with you what that means and how you can achieve it for greater engagement, retention, and overall success.

What is a Coaching Culture?

So, what is a coaching culture? Essentially, it’s a culture that helps your employees learn and grow. It’s not a command-and-control culture guided by fulfilling and performing to satisfy management directives. While the command-and-control culture, top-down management approach has historically been the norm, more and more companies today are shifting to a coaching culture to inspire creativity, autonomy, innovation, and ultimately, business growth. In the digital age, the way we work changes daily. No manager will ever have all the answers, and it’s up to individual team members to take some authority over their success and output. Coaching culture helps make this happen.

You’ll achieve greater employee engagement, more impressive performance, limitless creativity, effective management, greater ownership, and much more with a coaching culture.

3 Ways to Build Coaching Culture at Your Company

So, how do you start building this sort of culture to elevate your organization’s success? Here are a few ways.

Train Your Management Team

In many cases, coaching culture will start with buy-in from your leadership team and managers. So, first, provide training for your management team to teach them the basics of coaching, including active listening, building rapport with direct reports, practical assessments and feedback, goal setting and tracking, etc. One great way to do this is to enlist your managers in coaching programs to work 1:1 with their coach and see what it takes to be an effective coach for their direct reports.

Then, once they complete training, you want to make sure you have a plan to implement moving forward. This could incorporate goal setting, more frequent reviews, 1:1 weekly meetings, etc., so managers can be more involved—a coach helping devise a plan for success, not a cheerleader watching from the sidelines.

Put Accountability Measures in Place

Accountability in coaching culture is two-fold. First, you must keep management accountable for fulfilling their action plans. However, that’s not all it takes for a coaching culture to be influential. You also must stress to employees that it’s essential that they take their development seriously. They must feel empowered to make autonomous decisions, be self-reflective, and implement changes discussed with their managers, despite how uncomfortable it may be to try new things or exercise new skills.

This could come from reporting every quarter via surveys for both managers and their direct reports to ensure everyone is on the same page and getting what they need!

Ask Questions at Every Level

Questions are the key to open communication, vital for an effective coaching culture. Management and employees alike should be encouraged to ask tough questions regarding performance, skills gaps, solutions to team challenges, etc. The more questions that are asked, the easier it is to feel empowered with solutions to move forward autonomously while building skills and impacting the organization positively.

One way to do this is to set up a weekly 1:1 meeting with direct reports based solely on their development goals. Not pending tasks (although that may tie into the conversation), no disciplinary discussions, just focused on growth, goals, and achievements. This way, team members will feel valued and see a more straightforward path to advancement within your organization!

Next week, we’ll share a blog that teaches how to ensure your managers are on board and implementing! Stay tuned…

Need Help Designing a Company Culture That Allows Employees to Thrive? NimblyWise Can Help.

Deloitte has found that 94% of executives and 88% of employees consider a distinct workplace culture important to organizational success. So, if your company isn’t focusing on building a positive culture yet, it’s time to start, or you will be left behind. NimblyWise’s organizational culture is built around coaching culture. As such, we are fully prepared to help you build yours. Let’s discuss how.