Part One: Why did we want a coaching culture?

The business world tells us that the recipe for building a high performance culture is to develop leadership at every level in the organization.  It is also widely accepted that a “coaching style” is effective as an accelerator to developing leaders.

As coaches and human resource professionals we often imagine a theoretical organization where “everyone is a coach and has a coach”. But how would this actually work?   The coaching culture transformation at Coastal is an authentic demonstration of what can be accomplished with a dedicated team in a small organization with the right fundamentals.

Coastal’s Story

In 2007, Coastal Community promoted a significant number of employees to management roles and many of these managers were new to the role of leading people.  In addition, a significant number of Coastal’s revenue-generating employees were being supported by these new managers and it was realized that this might pose a risk to the organization.  A fast track, effective leadership development program became a critical need.  

Beginning in 2007, Deborah Lang joined the Human Resources team at Coastal Community where she was introduced to the challenges Coastal was facing with the high percentage of newly promoted front-line managers. In addition, Coastal’s Culture Taskforce had compiled the results from an internal Employee Opinion Survey which identified that only 62 per cent of employees agreed with the statement that “my leaders provide good direction and achievable goals on a regular basis.”

To better understand the current demands of the working environment, Lang’s manager/supervisor, Bruno Dragani, asked her to job shadow a number of managers and employees to become familiar with Coastal’s culture. 

Coastal has a long history of a caring and employee-focused culture. This caring attitude can sometimes be seen as a barrier to creating a feedback-rich, high-performance culture. When employees deeply care about one another, sometimes there is a hesitancy to say something to an employee or colleague that might challenge them or hurt their feelings. Authentic leadership coaching conversations create a feedback-rich, high-performance culture where employees are coached to be leaders, to think for themselves, and strive to be the best they can be.

Lang noticed that the word coaching was used by managers as a “catch-all phrase” to describe all kinds of interactions between managers and employees. Managers were expected to conduct weekly “coaching” sessions with employees, but managers had no specific training in “leadership coaching”. 

In general – what was called coaching by managers at Coastal was more like mentoring (Manager as Mentor) or sports/sales coaching (Manager as Expert) – rather than leadership coaching “Manager as Coach”.  All of the styles of coaching are appropriate at different times – the key is to choose the style that is the best fit.

·         The Manager as Mentor uses wisdom and real-life experience as guideposts and provides “advice” to employee to consider when making decisions.

·         The Manager as Expert is like a “sports” or “sales” coach where the manager “tells” the employee to follow a specific game plan and/or sales model. 

·         The Manager as Coach uses listening skills and open-ended questions to assist employees to come up with their own solutions/strategies – employees are encouraged to “think on their own” to develop leadership skills.

According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF) leadership coaching is not like sports coaching, sales coaching or even mentoring.  Leadership coaching uses active listening skills and open-ended questions to assist people to reach their own solutions. Leadership coaches do not provide advice – they use questions to support people to make their own decisions.

Drawing from her previous executive coaching experience, Lang could see the benefits of introducing leadership coaching to the organization. To develop credibility and buy-in from managers, Lang started to provide regular leadership coaching sessions to internal managers, demonstrating the positive effects coaching could bring to individuals, teams and the work environment.

“I had the pleasure of personally experiencing the positive results an engaged, devoted and passionate coach can generate,” said Lorraine Richardson, branch manager. “This coach was from within Coastal Community Credit Union and this experience was priceless due to the confirmation and self-discovery it revealed.”

Looking at the big picture, the HR Organizational Development (OD) team could see that a coaching culture that supported all kinds of coaching – leadership coaching, sales coaching and mentoring – would provide alignment to the primary theme of Coastal’s vision which focused on “developing leadership.” 

A leadership development strategy was created supporting the corporate vision that “all employees are leaders from the front-line to the CEO”.  One of the primary goals of Coastal’s leadership development strategy was to create a feedback-rich learning organization where all employees coach each other to be the best they can be.

First steps first: the HR OD Team worked with their internal business partners and identified that there was a gap in leadership coach training for front-line managers. HR recognized that a fresh approach was required to deal with the effects of early management promotions and their subsequent effect on employees. They began to research leadership coach training for managers.  The journey to create a true coaching culture was about to begin.

Watch for Part Two: “How we created a coaching culture” in the October 28^th issue of HRVoice.org.  

About the Authors:

Deborah Lang EQi, ConRes, CHRP, MBA is the Associate Vice President, Organizational Development for Coastal Community Credit Union. She was the in-house coaching champion and mentor for the coaching culture transformation.

Paul Gossen, Founder, Business Transformed, ICF Professionally Certified Coach, PCC.  Paul was the external coach trainer for the leadership coach training initiatives – to date sixty (60) Managers at Coastal have completed Manager as Coach training.