13/01/2021
We know we want it, there’s plenty of evidence to demonstrate how effective it is, so why do companies find it so universally difficult to achieve?
I hear plenty of people claiming that incompetent managers with poor coaching skills are the reason why their coaching culture fizzled and faded. I also frequently hear that their people managers are just too busy with ‘busy work’ to engage in creating the coaching culture.
I’m not buying it.
Firstly, every day in every organisation, in every country around the World, coaching is happening. A lot. Granted, it’s mostly organic and unrecorded, but it’s happening. Secondly, if your managers were THAT incompetent, how come you’re still in business?
As a consultant I was called into ‘Client A’ who had recently embarked on a coaching culture initiative. They were hoping that this initiative would improve employee engagement with all of the operational benefits associated. What they actually experienced was a dramatic fall in employee engagement, motivation and performance. Their staff satisfaction scores pertaining to how employees viewed management and leadership went through the floor and there was a very nasty ‘atmosphere’ in the offices.
This organisations particular ‘road to hell’ was paved, in part, with the implementation of a comprehensive professional coaching initiative for all people managers. No expense spared. Everyone trained. I reviewed the curriculum and found that it was all good solid stuff…GROW model, how to ask coaching questions, the importance of listening, being non-judgmental blah blah blah.
However, when I reviewed the staff satisfaction survey comments, I saw phrases such as ‘doesn’t support me’ and ‘feedback is lacking’ and so on. On speaking in person to their people, I heard comments such as:
‘I don’t bother approaching them anymore because they’re not interested in helping me’
‘I have NO idea if I’m doing a good job’.
This was pretty counter-intuitive for an organisation that had just spent a small fortune training its managers to do the exact opposite.
The explanation turned out to be quite surprising. Their managers had implemented the principles of the professional coaching training to the letter. To the letter.
Professional coaching (sometimes called executive coaching) is pretty purist. The core tenets are to resist offering opinions and suggestions on pain of death, and to default to a question at all times. The diligent and well-meaning managers in this organisation had taken this instruction and applied it faithfully. In every possible situation. Asked a question from a member of their team? They answered with a question of their own. Very annoying.
I’m sure that part of the problem was poor question construction, and a failure to recognise that feedback is not the same thing as judgement, but this would not have had such a dramatically negative effect had there not been so much inappropriate ‘coaching’.
When looking at another organisations failed attempt to implement a coaching culture, it’s easy to become smug. But remember it’s relatively easy to diagnose what has gone wrong, and a whole lot harder to do it right in the first place. Is there a silver bullet, and if so what is it? Well, there are some useful assumptions that will help you to start on the right foot:
Build on your existing foundation.
Expect unintended consequences and mitigate.
Plan your initiative with the end in mind.
The first assumption will help to ensure that what you put in place regarding manager support, adds to what is already happening and doesn’t undermine any existing good practice. Your managers coach every day and some of them are jolly good at it! Make sure that before you leap in with your organisational change hat on, you identify and assimilate the existing coaching skills, knowledge & experience in your teams. If what they doing is all kinds of wrong (business failing, poor satisfaction scores, employees rioting), then marching in with your ‘broom’ may be justified, but in my experience, there are always precious pockets of expertise to tap in to. Build on your existing foundation.
Unintended consequences are exactly what happened at ‘Client A’. They utilised a professional coaching curriculum that was ‘correct’ but which was inappropriate for the ‘in-the-moment’ coaching that managers needed to undertake to build confidence and performance in their teams. Performance coaching, utilises all of the same tools and techniques as Professional coaching, but is dramatically different in its application and how it ‘feels’. Performance coaching is about being flexible in your style, assessing whether coaching is the appropriate response and providing the right support for the individual and situation.
There are lots of variables that need to be considered, and common sense and nuance needs to be applied to the coaching principles. You can leave that up to the delegates to figure out, but it’s a risky strategy and surely that’s the who point of having adult learning specialists on the team? To think about those who might need some guidance and practice about when to coach?
In ‘Client A’s’ example, it might have been a fault of the facilitation, or it might have been the high-compliance nature of the workforce (engineers), or both. Either way, had the curricular taken the demographic into account, I believe the programme of support would have looked very different.
And finally, ‘planning with the end or outcome in mind’. You need to be able to define the desired behavioural before you start developing the programme of support. If ‘Client A’ had written a brief that stated ‘At the end of the programme of support, all managers will only answer questions with questions’, then they would have achieved their goal 100%. Be specific and make sure that the behavioural outcome is going to improve manager and team performance. Maybe ‘Managers who are happy and confident to coach ‘in the moment’ and who instinctively know when a coaching approach is the right approach’.
In summary, be careful of the coaching purists, build on existing expertise, make sure you know what kind of coaching you need to achieve the desired culture.
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