#9 - Establishing a coaching culture!
27 Apr 24
One of the best ways to build a high-performing team is to establish a coaching culture.
This builds resilience and robustness into the team, and also reduces staff churn as the Company is investing in them.
Personnel share knowledge and an atmosphere of transparency, healthy challenge and questioning results. This generates a learning environment.
People also start to look out for each other, covering workload and therefore behave as a team rather than a collective of individuals. Cohesion increases as a result.
Whilst the results do take time to manifest themselves, in the long run this approach takes issues away from the staff arena, and thus allows the team to focus in on delivery issues.
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#9 - Establishing a coaching culture!
What?
Building a team is a challenging pursuit. To build a high-performing team is even harder.
It relies on everyone playing their part. They will do this firstly through demonstrating that they are competent, and feeling that they individually as well as collectively have a role to play within the team.
They will also do this through displaying their commitment both to their role and the team. Once these components are in place, we have a solid foundation from which we can start to build cohesion.
Why?
Think of the components of a team as individual building blocks, similar to a house. The aim is to strengthen the way in which those blocks bond with each other to form a much stronger structure. This ensures that a team can withstand external pressure and is robust and resilient enough to weather the storm over time.
The first component of cohesion is trust. Everyone must be able to trust each other. Trust is the very cement that bonds the blocks together.
The second component is establishing a coaching culture.
This further strengthens existing bonds and ensures that the knowledge already held within the team is shared. This drives a self-correcting, Iearning and questioning culture where there is no such thing as a stupid question.
It also ensures that you have no areas which are single points of failure, since knowledge is shared.
People automatically become more transparent with each other. Situations are viewed as learning opportunities. Failure is viewed as a mechanism to gain instant feedback. This is then fed back in to bolster existing knowledge and the learning cycle continues.
How?
It is important to acknowledge that it will take time to generate a culture such as this in an existing team. It is much quicker if you are starting a team from scratch.
But both are ultimately achievable.
This may be achieved through adopting the following steps:
- Sell your vision to both your line management and to your team. Outline the advantages of starting to build this capability, focussing in on the strategic viewpoint. Investment in people means less staff churn which allows focus to shift away from staff issues to solving delivery issues.
- Identify potential Ambassadors within each area of your team who 'get the why' and start to build a guiding coalition. Reinforce the message with them to ensure they are 'all in'.
- Send those personnel away on short introductory coaching courses to maintain and consolidate interest.
- Allocate coaches to each coach. Make sure that the coach coaches those outside of their immediate area. This maintains objectivity and preserves the Organisational Structure line management.
- Ask each Ambassador to engage with their respectively assigned areas. Identify issues and problem areas, home in on any trends seen.
- Ambassadors then create development plans for areas.
- Encourage your Ambassadors to reach out to individuals to deduce whether they are receptive to coaching interventions at an individual level. Continue with those that are interested. Still maintain regular communications with those who are skeptical.
- Use every opportunity that presents to educate the team as a collective.
- Emphasise to everyone to look out for each other in terms of workload. Encourage covering for each other and thinking as a team not as a collective of individuals.
- Monitor the effectiveness of the new regime by holding monthly engagement sessions to check on progress. Gather feedback for improvements and make sure everyone has a voice. Iterate as often as required.
In Summary
I hope that you enjoyed reading this newsletter and that it has given you food for thought.
The establishment of a coaching culture within an organisation or team is one of the major game-changing initiatives that a leader can introduce. Not only will it stabilise staff churn, people will respond positively to it as it shows commitment from the Company to invest in them as individuals. Team cohesion strengthens, resilience is improved and a transparent learning environment based around trust ensues. This is one of the best investments you can make as a leader!
Have a great week!
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