INFLUENCE OF COACHING CULTURE ON STRATEGY CREATION AND ALIGNMENT
At every point in the organisation, where strategy has to be created (and this can ,in many cases be right through to individual departments), there needs to be a process of constructive challenge. This process focuses people clearly on:
If that sounds reminiscent of coaching’s GROW (Goals, Reality, Options, When?) model (Downey 2003; Whitmore 2002), it is hardly surprising – the core of effective coaching at work is the stimulation of rigorous thinking.
Putting constructive challenge of strategy into a coaching context has several benefits.It takes a lot of the sting out of conversations that review past performance, so people are less likely to be defensive.It requires a commitment by all involved to consider the difficult questions openly and honestly,it helps to build relationships, because the process of dialogue properly managed stimulates self-disclosure and understanding of each other. Fourth, strategy development carried out in a coaching style facilitates individual and team learning
Strategic alignment
For those people in an organisation who are outside the strategy crafting process – and this is typically the majority of employees – a critical problem is how to make the strategy relevant and meaningful for them. No matter how brilliantly conceived a strategy may be, it can become badly unravelled if people who are not involved in its formation are constantly making small decisions that go against it. These small decisions accumulate very rapidly.
Research into strategic alignment indicates strongly that dialogue achieves far more than instruction or discussion (Yankelovich 2001). Putting the muscle of coaching behind execution of strategy with dialogueing as against a command and control mindset Challenges are revealed more swiftly and more easily; resolving them also typically takes place earlier and at a lower level. We turn a cult into a culture by what Reg Revans (1998) memorably described as ‘the upward communication of doubt’.
INFLUENCES ON PERFORMANCE
The impact of a coaching culture at the individual, team and organisation level.
The individual level
Increasing access and availability ensures there is serious lack of attention on critical tasks and the urge to indulge in urgent but not important tasks is at all time high . People are coerced or seduced into working long hours because, they say, ‘the nature of the work demands it’. Like painting the Forth Bridge, the tasks of a knowledge worker stretch on forever
For example -Dealing with all our own e-mail correspondence, rather than the items that are really important.
The antidote to this de facto modus operandi is the creation of a reflective space. Coaching is an opportunity to call a halt to the frenetic pace of doing and to refocus on being. It enables people to challenge their routines, to take a critical look at what they are doing and why, to identify and commit to new performance goals and to work out how to overcome
A high-performance culture invests considerable effort in helping people identify and overcome the barriers to continuous personal improvement in the priority aspects of their job roles. Rather than reward people solely on whethor not they reach their targets, it also takes into account the progress the individual makes towards overcoming factors that prevent performance. Performance improvements in the primary targets are almost always the result of a number of improvements in subsidiary behaviours and/or skills.
The team level
In most cases, managers declare that the cumulative impact would be greater than the sum of the individual improvements.One of the most important factors is what even such a small improvement in performance would do to release their time from fire-fighting (sorting out yesterday’s and today’s problems) and put it into more future-oriented activities.
An important element here is having a team development plan, which links performance goals for the team with individual learning and performance improvement. This creates a transparency of learning need that allows team members to coach each other.
The organisational level
The modern corporation is measured on a much wider range of performance factors than its predecessors, by a much wider range of stakeholders. Although financial performance is still dominant as the yardstick for investors, the quality of corporate governance, for example, is now a major influence on company ratings too. Other stakeholders rate companies as employers, or as corporate citizens. coaching processes can play a valuable role in ensuring that actual organisational behaviour is frequently assessed against espoused behaviour. One of the most important roles for the external coach can be to help the top team define wider performance goals, test the commitment to those goals and ensure that it gives sufficient quality of thinking to how it will achieve each performance element, and how it will measure performance against softer corporate targets.
INFLUENCE ON THE KEY ENABLERS OF ORGANISATIONAL PERFORMANCE
Communication, staff attitudes, knowledge management and financial awareness are seen as the key influences on performance that can be impacted by a coaching culture.
Communication
What communication functions does is of little importance, unless it is in support of critical cultural factors – in particular, the credibility of the leadership, the quality of trust between people and departments, the quality and scope of knowledge exchange and clarity of purpose.
Coaching has a substantial role to play in each of these contexts. Top management credibility is consistently low in most organisations. Communication coaching extends well beyond the basic skills of listening and presenting. It tackles, for example, the leader’s role as chief communication strategist and role model, how to create and stimulate organisational dialogue, and building personal credibility.
The need for honesty to make progress stimulates self-disclosure, which in turn promotes rapport and confidence in each other. The use of mentoring and coaching between people from merging organisations can be particularly effective.
Staff attitudes (great place to work)
If staff attitudes are hostile or in disarray, the chances of obtaining concerted effort to achieve stretching objectives are low.
Coaching hits a great many of the dimensions within these measurement frameworks. Coaching gives palpable evidence and experience to staff that their manager is concerned about results, that they support the achievement of these results, that they take an interest in staff development, and that they make themselves available.
Knowledge management
Coaching supports both the ‘hard’ side of knowledge management (the skills and the explicit, prescriptive learning) and the ‘soft’ (the tacit and intuitive learning). Knowledge has been described as pragmatic, partial, tentative and always open to revision – a collective interpretation and reinterpretation.
Coaching creates the dialogue that allows this constant reinterpretation to take place, but additionally ensures that it does so against a background of current business and personal priorities.
Commercial and financial awareness
When was the last time you, or anyone in your team, was coached by a customer? Yet what better resource for learning commercial realities? Customer listening sessions are one thing – useful but limited. Customer coaching brings a whole new dimension and quality to the learning process.
The modern organisation cannot function effectively unless the vast majority – if not all – of its employees are commercially and financially aware. If it recognises opportunities to manage costs, or build customer loyalty and the implications of missed opportunities, there is high potential for positive impact on business performance. But such awareness does not
come naturally for many people. Coaching, with its use of anecdote and story, brings these issues alive. The more creative the coaching approach – for example, by using customers as one of the resources – the more vivid the learning experience.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF NOT CREATING A COACHING CULTURE
Sources:
The Heart of Coaching –Thomas Crane
Coaching Culture –David Clutterbeck
High Performance organizations –Andre De Wal