You’ve experienced the impact of coaching. It’s been so significant in enhancing your own professional growth, that you’ve incorporated it into your approach to leadership. Coaching has enabled you to energize and empower your team and drive meaningful results. And now you’re excited to share it with your whole organization. 

The challenge: making the shift from being a leader who values coaching, to being a leader who builds a comprehensive coaching culture.

So how do you get there from here?

Define Coaching Culture 

Let’s start with some shared language.

Coaching is a non-directive communication framework that helps cultivate feedback, insight, and growth. A coaching culture is an environment in which coaching becomes a standard approach for working together to drive meaningful results. 

To deepen this definition, we can look to the International Coaching Federation’s Prism Awards. 

The Prism Awards honours businesses and organizations that have outstanding coaching cultures. To earn this prestigious award, candidates are evaluated on four key outcomes. They must demonstrate they use coaching to:

  • Meet key strategic goals
  • Shape the organizational culture
  • Yield discernible and measurable positive impact
  • Fulfill rigorous professional standards

In a coaching culture, coaching is integrated into your communications practices, business strategy, and key performance indicators. 

3 Ways to Build a Coaching Culture

There are three ways Essential Impact helps organizations build coaching cultures:

  1. Training Individual Champions
  2. Developing Internal Coaches
  3. Investing in Organizational Training and Development

Each of these approaches can be implemented on its own, or you can blend them to develop a more tailored strategy. And because each organization is different, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. 

Let’s explore each approach and how it could help shape your organization’s culture.

1. Training Individual Champions

Coach training is a game-changer. Whether you’re training new hires, seasoned team members, or C-suite leaders, coach training provides structure for more meaningful and productive conversations. 

Over time, as individuals throughout your organization become fluent in these types of conversations, momentum builds. Coaching begins to influence everything from boardroom discussions, to team meetings, and weekly one-on-ones. Training individual champions can quickly lead to creating a cultural groundswell. 

The problem, though, is getting started. Explaining coaching can be complicated. Coaching is simple enough in practice, but conceptually nuanced. This makes it challenging to communicate, let alone develop meaningful buy-in. 

Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. 

We know that the best way to understand coaching is to see it in action. Once you’ve seen how coaching works, it’s much easier to consider its impact and its value. 

That’s why each month we host a Live Coaching Event. During these events we facilitate a live, unscripted coaching demonstration. After, we debrief the demo, unpacking how coaching works and what makes it so effective. We also include plenty of time for Q&A. 

This is a great way for individuals and teams to observe and experience coaching. After all, seeing is believing! Or at the very least, seeing is a helpful way to start a better conversation. 

Questions to consider: 

  • How could training individual champions shift the culture in your organization?
  • What could your team accomplish if they had coaching skills?
  • What are some other ways you explain/explore coaching in your organization?

2. Developing Internal Coaches 

An internal coach is an experienced, accredited coach who either works within your organization, or is contracted to support it. 

Internal coaches can play a strategic role working with individuals, teams, departments and/or the entire organization. Some common use cases include:

  • Onboarding new hires
  • Facilitating one-to-one coaching 
  • Facilitating team training 
  • Supporting change management strategies
  • Helping level-up future leaders 
  • Supporting succession planning strategies 

You can imagine how a dedicated internal coach could help shift the culture beyond the status quo and help fuel meaningful, results-driven change.

A great example of this comes from Canadian Western Bank (CWB). When Senior Vice President of Human Resources Supriya James saw that CWB needed to pivot in order to align with their new core values, she realized the solution was coaching. Her first step was to complete coach training and become an internal coach. Since then, she’s helped develop a thriving coaching culture that’s resulted in: 

  • Over 300 employees receiving 1:1 coaching with a 94% satisfaction rating
  • A 6% increase in their trust index score in the midst of the global pandemic
  • National recognition as one of the top 50 Best Workplaces™

To catch Supriya’s full story, watch the webinar we hosted in partnership with CWB and Chartered Professionals in Human Resources (CPHR) Alberta.

If developing an internal coach is the next right step for your organization, consider our Certified Leadership Coach (CLC) Program. This year-long program includes 76 hours of immersive, experiential coach training that’s recognized by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). It equips individuals with the knowledge, skills, and experience to show up as an accomplished coach and a confident leader. 

You can also check out the ICF’s comprehensive database of accredited coaches and training programs. While you’re there, you’ll find Essential Impact and our team of accredited coaches. But you’ll also have access to teams and organizations around the world. The ICF also offers tips for considering and narrowing down your search. 

Questions to consider: 

  • What could your team accomplish if they had access to an internal coach?
  • What outcomes would you measure?
  • What might help you achieve better results: developing an internal coach from within your organization, or working with a contracted coach?  

3. Organizational Training and Development

Reimagining your company culture is a tall order. The good news is you don’t have to go it alone. 

We work with organizations worldwide to develop and sustain strategies for building coaching cultures. And because no two companies are the same, we partner with you to develop a strategy that aligns with your goals. 

Opportunities for partnership include everything from one-to-one coaching, workshops, or private training for your teams. 

Questions to consider:

  • What training and development resources do you already have access to?
  • What type of training works best for your team?

To dig deeper, and learn more about how we can help, check out some of our case studies below. 

Coaching Culture Case Studies

We are proud to have partnered with six organizations that have won ICF Prism Awards including Rogers Communications, JOEY Restaurant Group, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, and more. To learn more, check out the case studies below. 

Confident professional woman

Rogers Communication Case Study

Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Prism Award Video

JOEY Restaurant Group Case Study

Final Thoughts

Holding true to a coach approach, instead of offering you a final solution, we’d like to offer some additional questions:

  • After reading this article, what’s become clearer for you? What questions do you still have?
  • If you had a magic wand and you could implement a coaching culture today, what would look different in two years? 
  • What next step can you take to move you towards that future?

Ready for a conversation? You can connect with us anytime at 1 (877) 930-1230 or info@essentialimpact.com.