How to Coach Yourself and Others How To Perform On The Job Coaching

3. A Coaching Culture 3.1 Definition A coaching culture is where many people in the workplace instinctively coach in their communications with each other -- they deeply listen and understand each other, generate relevant and realistic actions to make progress on current priorities -- and learn at the same time. Conventional 'training' is required to cover essential work-related skills, techniques and knowledge, and much of this section deals with taking a positive progressive approach to this sort of traditional 'training'. Importantly however, the most effective way to develop people is quite different from conventional skills training, which let's face it many employees regard quite negatively. They'll do it of course, but they won't enjoy it much because it's about work, not about themselves as people. The most effective way to develop people is instead to enable learning and personal development, with all that this implies. So, as soon as you've covered the basic work-related skills training that is much described in this section - focus on enabling learning and development for people as individuals - which extends the range of development way outside traditional work skills and knowledge, and creates far more exciting, liberating, motivational opportunities - for people and for employers. Rightly organisations are facing great pressure to change these days - to facilitate and encourage whole-person development and fulfilment - beyond traditional training. (Source: http://www.businessballs.com/traindev.htm) 3.2 10 steps to building a coaching culture Our expert: Peter Hawkins There are a simple set of 10 steps to building a coaching culture. However, while the steps may be easy to list, acting on them is a lot more difficult, with plenty of scope for losing the way, slipping or taking a false turn into a dead end. STEP ONE Why a coaching culture? A coaching culture should not be an end in itself but a means to an end. Otherwise it will become flavour of the month, just as the concepts of 'building a learning organisation', or 'total quality organisation' or 'customer-centric organisation' were before. To answer the question you need to start with the end in mind and know how being a coaching culture will serve the core strategy of the business. STEP TWO Make the link between the coaching culture strategy and the core strategy One trainee we worked with wanted a coaching culture to create more distributed leadership, so more decisions could be made closer to the customer, giving greater flexibility of service which was one of their key areas of competitive advantage. This clarity reduced the cynicism of those who did not think coaching was beneficial. 16

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