Friday, November 27, 2009

Why coaching cultures often don't "stick"

In my last post I talked about coaching cultures and how they are so important for companies to create . In another post I referred to a recent survey that said that over half of those surveyed reported that "coaching had slight, little or no impact on their job performance (60 percent) and satisfaction (54 percent). So why is there a problem in coaching having an impact in organisations? A recent article I read by Michael Bungay Stanier suggest a number of counterintuitive reasons for this.
"The focus on "coaching culture " runs the danger of confusing the means for the end and it is a lack of context -why do I need to use coaching ?- that can undermine any attempts to get managers coaching.
Commitment and engagement with coaching works best when there are 2 levels of context.
The first is a business context , enhancing coaching skills works best when it's serving a specific business purpose.....
The second is a personal context how will this help me and my work? Context allows managers to see coaching as a support and a solution -and not just the latest HR trend . " I think he's spot on with this and he goes to assert that " the greatest perceived barrier to managers coaching coaching others was not a lack of skill or lack of desire or lack of explicit support . It was a lack of time"
Coaching should be part of a a line managers everyday life so "unless the process is strightforward , flexible and next day useable" and unless they can do that in 10 minutes or less , managers don't have capacity for coaching. Knowing that they can (and should) coach in bursts of 10 minutes or less is very freeing for managers " . Yes and that's why a model or a process that is simple and can be applied in 1-10 minute conversations is so vital . That's also why an on line learning system taking 30 minutes or so a week is a good way of creating coaching as part of a daily routine . He also suggests "to abandon the quest to create excellent coaches , the truth is for most people's challenges , most of the time , being an adequate coach is more than enough" Accountants and other professionals in the main don't want to be excellent coaches but they do want simple skills to help reduce their workload.....
Introducing a coaching approach that produces adequate coaching BUT "easy" coaching that is part of daily interactions is far more powerful than spending thousands on trying to create elite internal coaches. Why send people on courses when they don't coach afterwards because they believe they have to be a Zen Guru or a language and visualisation expert. The simple route is to create a practical very easy to use adequate coaching process for that firm and spread it to many managers by using technology(interactive on line) and a little bit of support training .........
The skill is in setting up the coaching to be relevant to the context , jargon free and very easy to use on a daily basid. Adequate with lots of people having conversations that make progress= success

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