“If you care for your people,they care for clients, and shareholders benefit in the long run.”
Sir Richard Branson
In today’s demanding and challenging times only companies that are capable of unleashing the potential of their employees can succeed long-term. The management of such organisations consciously build the culture that spurs their employees to commit to taking individual responsibility for their everyday actions. The “traditional” motivation schemes, commonly referred to as “the stick and carrot” no longer work. Punishing employees leads to adopting a conservative approach and resorting to only those tasks that the employees handle with ease, which results in playing safe and lack of development.
The coaching culture enables people to:
- assume reponsibilty for their decisions and actions
- take the necessary business risk and come up with innovative ideas
- learn from mistakes and setbacks
- speak up, question the status quo and express own opinions – even if different
- give and receive constructive feedback
- feel appreciated and have the feeling that their input counts
- raise motivation and effectiveness, which translates into better business results
- build cohesive and effective teams
- develop a high level of motivation and effectiveness, which translate into better business results
- stay loyal to the organization
How to build the coaching culture?
Culture is a collection of people’s behaviours in the organisation behaviours influenced by individual convictions, beliefs, motivations, values, ethics, goals and aspirations. Introducing changes in the culture is a conscious long-term process – consistently implemented across the board.
Managers successfully creating the coaching culture present a specific attitude and have mastered a set of skills that make their team members look for better and better solutions, optimise processes, reaching new levels of performance and meeting business goals. As a result, those leaders create the working environment that attracts the best people on the market – based on respect, accountability and unlimited sense of possibility.
Carol Wilson – Managing Director of Performance Coach Training suggests The Ten Step Plan – a framework designed to support any organization in creating a coaching culture:
The Ten Step Plan to creating a coaching culture:
- Vision & purpose
- Organisational health check
- Stakeholder mapping
- Getting buy in
- Where to start
- What to measure
- Implement pilots
- Evaluation and forward planning
- Implement next phase
- Maintain the momentum
“Branson would never, under any circumstances, tell his staff what to do. He believed that the best person to make a decision about a work area is the one who is there, at the coal face. The more that managers control and check up on their employees, the less effort the employees will put in themselves. Why bother to exert oneself when someone else is going to correct the mistakes and change it all anyway.”
– Carol Wilson about her experience of cooperating with Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin
