Building A High Performance Organisational Coaching Culture

Do you as a coach or a leader who coaches want to bring a coaching culture into your organisation? Do you want to support people at all levels to grow professionally so they can have a powerful impact on their teams and the organisation? Do you believe creating a culture of trust, open-hearted conversation and courageous leadership will empower organisations to perform better and make a bigger impact?

More and more organizations in the Middle East region and around the world are recognizing the value of building a coaching culture to ensure they stay ahead in a global, competitive market place.
Empower World spoke with Mohamed Eraky, Workplace Coach ILM, NLP Practitioner, Human Centre & Design Thinking Expert. He shares his experience on introducing a coaching culture into a large organisation in Doha.

Mohamed shares how teaching senior leaders about the power of coaching and supporting them to experience what it can do for them is essential when developing a coaching culture.

Mohamed says “Leadership is not about telling people what to do, it’s about empowering others by asking questions and supporting people to discover the ‘how’ by themselves…. ask them how can they inspire themselves and in turn how can they inspire others”.

At Empower World we believe coaching is a way of unlocking the potential within each and every one of us. And creating a coaching culture in an organisation – which research has proven can improve performance, leadership, teamwork and output. Coaching has been part of leadership development initiatives across the globe for a few decades now in most large organizations who utilise external coaches or develop internal coaches or a combination of both to support their people.

Research has indicated organisations with coaching cultures have higher employee engagement, greater opportunities for revenue growth and an improvement in results.

A coaching culture evolves when conversations and feedback are taking place at all levels of the organisation, in the hall ways, over the phones, in meetings and so on. Learning, challenges, opportunities, growth and expansion becomes the norm in a respectful environment for all employees.

Coaches and leaders who recognise coaching in an organisation can support performance can champion and foster a coaching culture in the following ways:

1. Look to the future and envision how a coaching culture will empower the values and vision of the organisation. Potentially from a bigger and a more detailed perspective to cater for all the various communication styles in an organisation. Some people will be sold on the bigger ideas while others will really want to know the intricate details.
2. Get leadership buy in. Support the leaders in the organisation to be the champions of this initiative. Support them to be the change makers – if this is their choice – and to understand how they will lead this positive cultural change, as well as be role models for the employees throughout the organisation.
3. Develop a team of external accredited experienced coaches who are courageous enough to challenge and support senior leaders achieve the change needed to create success.
4. Build an internal accredited coaching team. Include coaching in their roles and responsibilities to support colleagues and facilitate coaching conversations.
5. Support mangers by providing foundation coaching skills training to have more impactful and progressive conversations and feedback.
6. Include coaching processes into HR departments and use ways of measuring performance so people can identify if they are on track or off track with their performance which are perfect opportunities for development, growth and expansion.
7. Review and gather feedback and learn about what is and what is not working. Feedback – as leadership expert Ken Blanchard says ‘feedback is the breakfast of champions.’ Understanding how self and others are performing, means continued development and new habits can be put into place as the organisation adapts to change and new ways of being and doing.
8. Review the performance of the coaching culture initiative to ensure it works.

The pursuit of mastery is never ending- being open and flexible to redesigning ideas and implementation will ensure the continued grow and success of the people and the organisation.

Listen to Empower World’s Coaching and Leadership Podcast Episode-84 to listen to the full interview with Mohamed Eraky, Workplace Coach ILM, NLP Practitioner, Human Centre & Design Thinking Expert and gain more insights into creating a coaching culture. Listen to Episode-84 on iTunes or ‪on Stitcher.

Be Empowered.