8 Ways to Build a High-Impact Coaching Environment

Throughout the 2014 Winter Olympics, it was awe-inspiring to witness the level of performance of the athletes. Years of practice and coaching, often started at a very young age, had prepared these athletes for the highest levels of performance in their careers. They came from diverse environments rich in focus and feedback, where coaching is respected and welcomed as a means to accelerate skill development.

Now organizations too, are focusing on coaching and learning more about how to create coaching environments to enhance both individual and organizational performance.

Which of the following eight elements can your organization strengthen to create a high-impact coaching environment?

• Connect the Dots between Strategy, Culture and Leadership
• Just as our Olympic athletes use coaches to continuously hone their skills, every employee can experience benefits from good coaching. Helping people step up to the next level of performance is what coaching is all about. But to have an impact on enterprise performance, coaching must focus on both individual and organization needs, starting with the goals to be delivered and the organizational culture needed to deliver the goals. Coaching has to help people reflect on these elements and target behaviours and practices that will be needed for success tomorrow. When organizations are clear about the way the culture needs to shift, and by identifying the specific behaviours that lead to this culture, they can then engage people in exploring how their own behaviour needs to shift.
• Frequent, positive communication
• Organizations with a coaching environment where there is permission to learn and sample different behaviours get communications right. The purpose of coaching is clearly described as developmental and about strengthening skills and culture for the future. Managers help this by building a positive vibe around coaching. They talk about their personal experiences in being coached and tell stories about how coaching has helped them. All of this builds a vibe that says coaching is for high-impact performance, not for “fixing” people.
• High-calibre coaching
• Creating a high-impact coaching environment relies on high-calibre coaching skills. People need to be trained in giving and receiving feedback. Managers need to be trained in coaching techniques and how to apply them. Often internal and external coaches are used in complimentary roles to support people as they apply new skills and as they progress to more demanding roles. Internal coaches are valuable because they bring deep knowledge about leadership development and play a key role in supporting on-job application of skills and on-boarding. Working in partnership, external coaches are valuable because they create an objective, confidential and challenging development process. Together they help people master new behaviours and adapt to new realities.
• Provide robust assessment and feedback
• How do you help a high performer move to the next level of performance? It starts with relevant feedback. An exploration of how behaviours and practices are being experienced by stakeholders is often a key part of development planning. Highimpact coaching organizations invest the time to find tools that reflect the leadership model needed for tomorrow’s world, not that of the past. They develop lots of feedback loops to managers and groups. All of this creates a feedback-rich environment where individuals and groups can monitor their progress and learn faster about how to adapt and change.
• Do a really good job at transitions
• Every organization needs a talent pipeline where people are progressing to new levels of competence. Promotions are windows of opportunity when people are often more reflective, more open to feedback and willing to experiment with different behaviours and practices. This is a time when the question about what will make you successful in the future, versus the past, is hard to answer and often introspection and development planning is required. When funds and time are tight, focusing on leadership and technical transition points when openness to learning is high is an effective strategy.
• Support managers
• Time spent orienting managers to competency models, aligning perspectives on the culture of the future and describing the coaching process builds manager confidence and commitment to coaching. When manager readiness is high, the stage is then set to focus on development goals and co-create powerful development plans.
• Develop a coaching cadence
• Organizations with high-impact coaching environments focus on a disciplined cadence of meetings that creates momentum for behaviour change. Whether it is weekly, biweekly or monthly development discussions, whether by phone or in person, they expect a disciplined approach that fasttracks learning. These organizations are clear that coaching time leads to high performance and they stick to a coaching schedule that makes sense for them, just like Olympic athletes.
• Address systemic issues
• One of the most significant advantages of developing a coaching environment is the feedback it provides around organizational barriers that people are facing. As organizations focus on work without boundaries and seek to improve collaboration and innovation, identifying what gets in the way is often difficult to uncover. When an environment of coaching is in place, where there is permission to provide feedback, challenge assumptions and explore new behaviours and practices, structures and systems that get in the way are exposed. In this way, both individuals and the organization develop for future success.

Building a coaching environment for high performance is no longer a nice-to-do. With complexity, ambiguity and the speed of change increasing, those organizations with a coaching environment will excel at being not just competent but also adaptive, resilient and agile.

That’s the kind of performance that wins medals!