Creating Coaching Culture

Coaching is a buzzword today for all good reasons. The dimensions of coaching have spread far and wide and therefore creating a coaching culture within an organisation is no wonder.

With the growing awareness and the need to fill the void in our life, life coaching as an industry is attracting many and corporates are no exception. Today relevance of creating a coaching culture as compared to the previous version of giving instructions and getting the work done be people is almost a necessity. Today both the giver and taker of instructions have a changed mindset. People want to increase their potential and therefore want to do more, achieve more, have more and succeed more. This quest to be more cannot be worked with the older dimensions of getting the work done by following a carrot or a stick approach. Organizations today are moving to Plant approach. That’s where coaching culture in a organization is playing a pivotal role.

Let’s explore how organizations are creating a Coaching Culture.

Ask Questions rather than give solutions

As a general trend, we have observed that in most organizations, the heads set the goal and direction of the company, they then appoint managers and departmental heads who in turn were responsible to manage the workforce by issuing instructions and getting the work done by the subordinates. That is a typical hierarchical culture as suggested and worked by management gurus in the past. However, this trend is not working anymore. As stated above, today ‘More is the Mantra. More not just in terms of money but also in self-development and achievement.

Today when heads encourage people to grow and learn, they make their managers or team leaders to work more as coaches than managers. They want them to help their subordinates grow and prosper. This is possible only when you help them to explore their inner self. Simply by giving instructions and getting the work done, people feel more robotic and therefore lose interest in their job. Contrarily, when you help them to first identify their goals and then help them to set action steps that too by asking questions instead of giving solutions, you become a coach. When you work as a coach, irrespective of being a life coach, executive coach or people’s coach, you by all means are helping both organization and people to grow and prosper multiple times.

Experience Life the way You Want to Experience

Coaching makes a valuable contribution to the process of helping people to experience life the way they want to experience it. For most people, coaching can literally change their lives for the better. The major challenge I have seen in people’s life is that although they set goals of happiness, peace and success yet they do not want to move an inch for it. All that I find most people is cribbing about the life that they don’t want to have. Rarely do they express and consequently experience life the way that they actually want. This is exactly where a coach plays a life-changing role for them. By active listening, presence and mirroring techniques the coach helps executives to see what they want and what they do. This distinctiveness helps the coachee to make a shift. They then strive towards how it has to be done.

Helps to create a work life balance

For many of us, life can be difficult. We place tremendous pressure on our- selves to have a lot, do a lot, and be generally successful in those areas of life we consider important. And as a matter of fact, all the areas of life are important for us. That might be having a great job, great performance, and subsequent promotions, having a great relationship, financial freedom, spending more time with family, generally living a fabulous life! I would not like to debate whether that’s right or wrong, but I do believe that coaching is a valuable counterbalance to that pressure and stress. By engaging the services of an executive coach or a life coach,  we can begin to focus on what really is important to us and what is not important to us and begin to shape what we need to do to align with what we truly want.

A coach helps the coachee to create a work life balance in accordance. Truly, coaching people is a very rewarding thing to do. It is about enabling people to create change through learning and implementing. Coaching is also about people being more, doing more, achieving more and, above all, contributing more. A coach  can help you to create a balance of all.

Helps to Make Better Choices

In our constant quest for success, happiness and fulfillment, there are umpteen situations wherein we come across plethora of options and we don’t realize what we are doing and what needs to be done. There are many choices but we may land up picking the wrong one. The decision that we take, impacts us for a lifetime. Many a times we don’t even realize that we need somebody to help us or even if we realize, we find it really hard to approach someone and ask for help.

Executive coaching provides a way by which one person can truly support the progress of another.  A coach can help you to identify your goals, help you to explore the options that you want to work on and then helps you to choose the one that fits your overall goals. Your choices become more clear and informed.  The best is that coaching gives people the opportunity to explore, find new meaning, and gain new insights and awareness about themselves and their lives. It allows people to set goals and design action steps to create the realities of life, that they prefer. In this aspect, coaching can today be considered as one of the most accepting, expanding, growth-enabling and results-oriented journey. It allows you to look into the mirror of your life and accept or change any part that you desire.

Helps to take more effective decisions and actions

The beauty of coaching is that you become conscious of things they have been overlooking for years. Lets, check how many times have you promised to do something for yourself or about a situation, or work on a relationship but just never got the time or found the right way to do it? How many times did you promise yourself to lose weight, exercise regularly, go for walk, eat healthy food and yet land up getting late, making no time to exercise and eating the junk food and then regretting with no solution? Nevertheless, how many times have you thought of making a crucial conversation with your boss, colleague or team member but either never had the courage or reason to do the same?  Here, in coaching, you quietly develop the courage, strategies and tools to face things they have put off for years. Work related choices decisions and actions that are most crucial could be taken when worked with deeper clarity. An executive coach will help you do that.

Makes Clearer Judgments about Situations

Based on my personal experience I can share that what clients consistently derive from a coaching experience includes: clearer judgments, heightened self- awareness, self-acceptance and a sense of well-being; improved goal-setting and goal attainment, life balance and lower stress levels; increased self-discovery, self-confidence and self-expression; better communication, problem- solving and decision making skills; enhanced quality of life; and, changed and broader perspectives and insight. I’m positive that we all can will keep adding to this list as we keep on gaining our experience in coaching. This is why many large-scale companies and international conglomerates today prefer a coaching culture in their organization.  

Interestingly, many people who are new to coaching rediscover new energy, joy, beauty, and purpose and meaning in life; jewels of life, which are lost when we become bogged down with the everyday chores of life. So when you get lost, and you need more clarity then either calmly explore the options and check the same in relation to overall goals and in case you find hard to do that, then simply connect to your coach.

When organizations choose to create coaching culture, they also choose to create more transparency, honesty and authenticity within their organization. Today, whether the company chooses to hire coaches or train their leaders to become coaches, they make an informed choice towards people’s development and positivity. For large organizations, it makes more sense to train the manpower within their organization as credentialed coaches. Irrespective of accreditations and certifications, the first and foremost priority is to train your people on coaching competencies.

ICF is an international body that helps you to gain ACC, PCC or MCC credential as a coach.

In any case, your first step is to be trained on those competencies. However, it’s not just about learning and training on coaching competencies, it is more about putting the same into practice. The real life coaches are the one who make their own life first as a laboratory to test on their life and then embark on their journey to coach only after self-transformation.  There are intensive life coach training workshops that can help you to hone your life coaching skills. The first step is to identify your people and help them enroll for such life coach training programs.

Your organization today needs more life coaches!

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