Is Coaching Elitist?

Coaching drives better performance and allows people to have happier and more profitable careers. And yet in most organisations it’s only available to senior teams and leaders, who are already personally successful.

That’s because coaching has traditionally been high-touch and required a significant financial investment, usually reserved for the privileged few. There’s an assumption here that by coaching leaders, performance gains will trickle down to the wider workforce… so that’s where the money is spent.

A considerable investment

It would cost £6 million per year to coach every employee in a 5,000 person company. (Assuming just 1 hour of coaching per month at £100 per hour per person). That’s without any team coaching.

But what if you could afford to give every single employee access to some form of coaching for a fraction of the price? How much more effective would organisations be?

We’ve entered an age where a manager with an internet connection and a software licence can coach their team towards more engaging work and better performance.

We are witnessing the democratisation of coaching

There’s lots of evidence that coaching improves engagement and performance at the individual and team level. But there are wider organisational benefits to democratising coaching.

1. Future-proofing
   Coaching generates new ways of thinking and problem solving that allows us to respond to change quickly and effectively, arming us for whatever is around the corner in this unpredictable world. What’s more, by exposing employees to coaching earlier in their career, when they are developing their skills, you are making a smart investment in future leaders.
2. Change culture for the long-run
   You can’t create a true coaching culture, if only a limited few have access to it. Only by encouraging coaching throughout an organisation, will it become part of “the way things are done around here”.
3. Attract and retain the best talent
   The best of the millennial workforce wants to be coached, not managed. The opportunity to be coached and to learn coaching skills could be the deciding factor for top talent entering the workforce today.
4. Empower everyone VS Reliance on leaders
   More problems will be solved if everyone is trying to solve them (duh!). But when the focus is on coaching leadership only, feedback and results from engagement surveys are channeled towards them. The message here is that they need to ‘fix it’. Democratising coaching in an organisation encourages everyone to become part of the solution and consider what they can do to grow, reducing the reliance on leaders.

Making coaching more available in an organisation cultivates a genuine coaching culture so that coaching is not reserved simply for the privileged elite at the top.

Learn more about Saberr’s award-winning coaching technology at saberr.com/coachbot