Leadership coaching has become a mainstream approach for developing today’s best leaders in organizations large and small across the globe. In 2010 it was a $2 billion industry and growing. Today, as organizations experience the positive impact of executive coaching, there is increased interest in developing a coaching culture that supports a coaching mind-set throughout the organization and equips managers with coaching skills and a simple methodology that allows for what we can call just-in-time coaching—an intentional approach to developing team members on the spot when it matters most.
Clutterbuck and Megginson (2005) offer a definition of a coaching culture: “Coaching is the predominant style of working together, and where a commitment to grow the organization is embedded in a parallel commitment to grow the people in the organization” (p. 19). Recent studies have examined the key ingredients in developing a coaching culture in an effort to extend the power of coaching well beyond the commonly used external executive coach approach. The Center for Creative Leadership conducted a benchmarking study in 2008 analyzing the trends in coaching inside organizations and based on the input of 347 leaders across industries. It concluded that the development of a strategic initiative to create a coaching culture requires a deliberate approach using five strategies:
Hawkins and Smith (2006) carefully examined the path in developing a coaching culture and articulated seven stages in developing a coaching culture:
Hawkins and Smith highlight the importance of evaluation at each stage in this process in order to support the shift in culture, stressing the reality that a shift to a coaching culture must not be an end in itself but rather a means to a stronger and more successful organization.
In our work with organizations focused on developing a coaching culture, we’ve had an opportunity to engage with organizations that develop a strategic approach in building a coaching culture from the ground up. TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company is one of those organizations (McHenry, Harrah, and Berry, 2008). Over the course of several years, TaylorMade’s coaching culture has evolved from a handful of executive coaching engagements to a full-blown coaching culture achieving impressive success in the marketplace and fast becoming a best-place-to-work environment in Southern California. Here we chronicle both the strategies it created at the outset and its pathway through the stages of development similar to those that Hawkins and Smith (2006) articulated.
In the year 2000, the leadership team of the TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company was fractured and frustrated. There was an absence of trust, meaningful collaboration, and camaraderie. The CEO first tried unofficially disbanding the senior team and discontinuing regular staff meetings that had been unproductive and often devolved into conflict. In a sense, he sent the team members “to their corners.” Having tried different tactics and methods to pull the group together, he determined that the one area yet to be explored was team and individual development. He decided it was time for the group to take a hard look at their ineffective working relationships and explore how to develop greater awareness, tolerance, and understanding as individuals and as a team.
Having reached a plateau of $300 million in sales, TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company was no longer a small enterprise. It was clear that what had worked before was no longer effective if the team was to move past the plateau and into a significant expansion of market influence and leadership. Not surprisingly, the primary challenge was one of communication and collaboration. The team had grown larger in order to reach the $300 million mark, but what had not grown was its ability to share more, understand more, and work together in new ways. Team members were stuck in silos, splitting off one another to protect their turf, living in a daily mind-set of individual rather than company success. The challenge was one of competition versus collaboration. The CEO understood that for the company to take the next step in its development, his leadership team had to develop as well.
Having experienced the impact of professional coaching and leadership consulting before, the CEO understood the potential impact an intervention could have. With the advice and counsel of both his HR leader and an outside consultant and executive coach, he decided to step into this new endeavor, believing that this focus on communication and collaboration would illuminate a way forward. With the personalities and conflicts that existed previously, he tasked his consulting partners with pulling the group together through a leadership assessment tool and demonstrated his own willingness to hear some tough messages about his dysfunctional team. Participation came with significant resistance. However, the CEO led by sharing his own values, strengths, and challenges. Team members followed his example, and the pattern of internal competition slowly began to change.
Early in his tenure, the CEO recognized that to change the dysfunctional pattern of the executive team, collaboration would have to take priority over competition. The CEO rejected the notion of quick fixes to deeply challenging problems. At an early off-site meeting, the team was given a choice to continue in the old pattern of surface relating or change the pattern to foster greater depth. A useful metaphor was born at the meeting. The difference was identified as “diving rather than surfing.” It is a striking example that fits the Hudson cycle of renewal. The team was out of sync, and instead of moving forward through a series of small tweaks and adjustments, the CEO enabled and instructed the team to do something quite different. He challenged them to take a deeper look in order to repurpose and redirect the group’s effectiveness for one another and for the business.
Out of the team’s initial interactions with the assessment and the challenge to dive rather than surf, it became clear that a small percentage of the team members were ready to challenge themselves to become more effective leaders of the business. Equally clear was that a larger proportion of the group wanted nothing to do with activities that required confronting and exploring the hard and personal questions raised through both personal assessment and the team discussions that followed. Those few who wanted to go further were offered the chance to work individually with a professional coach. These early adopters made a decision that continues to resonate in the organization today.
The CEO made a decision to explore a new way to get at the old problems he and his team were facing. To use Freud’s analogy from archaeology, he saw that a beautiful layer has to be destroyed in order to get to the next level. There was a significant desire to change on the part of the CEO that flowed from him to his team and eventually out into the wider organization. As painful as it had become, it took courage to destroy what had worked for so long based on the promise of something that could not yet be seen.
A series of interventions, off-site meetings, and individual consulting and coaching were undertaken to help individuals and the group deal more effectively with existing and recurring conflict (competition versus collaboration). What was clear early on was that the group rarely, if ever, took time to reflect, think, absorb, and discuss what was going on with them as individual leaders and as a team. The people themselves were never the subject matter of their discussions; rather it was always about the actions necessary to move the business forward. This orientation toward action, absent reflection, was the working style of the team members and represented their most significant challenge. The success of this period was both the sharing of a slowly evolving common language of development (the values, strengths, and challenges mentioned earlier) and the ability to remain in the tension of action versus reflection in spite of some vocal and ongoing resistance to the work.
While the coaching initiative appeared to many as an organic outgrowth of the work of the senior team, this initiative was, significantly, an aligned decision by the CEO and the HR leader to optimize and extend into the organization the development work that the senior executives were engaged in. They believed that individuals who hold leadership positions in the company needed to be better equipped to lead their teams and functions well and, in some cases, prepare themselves for more senior roles. In hindsight, this is both an obvious and simple directive, but in the context of the time, it marked a significant shift in the attitude of the organization that it would now take responsibility for developing the leaders of the organization. With that responsibility came the permission and support to extend coaching into the ranks. The absence of reflection and the need to safely and creatively explore new possibilities for old problems existed in the wider leadership group, beyond the executive team. In this way, coaching has provided a safe harbor for the affected, and the opportunity for repair is now built into the culture.
After attending the coach training program at the Hudson Institute and inviting some of that organization’s alumni to begin coaching relationships with senior leaders, the HR leader at TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company decided to expand the number of internal coaches by sending seven members of his team to the same training program over a three-year period. This decision, made in 2004, led to an equal number of internal and external coaches serving the business. This would shift permanently in 2006 when the senior team decided that, with the internal capacity now at a sustainable threshold, external coaching relationships would be discontinued below the executive level in order to take full advantage of the investment made in an internal coaching group.
With some limited but important experience with external coaches, the senior team determined that the value of cultural learning and awareness held by the internal outweighed the pure coaching technique and experience of the external coaches. The team discovered that internal coaches with both competence and the context of living day-to-day inside the organization are more effective, get more buy-in, and have more intuitive initial empathy than external coaches.
There were also challenges to this decision: confidentiality and objectivity might been lessened because of the decision. For a variety of both positive and negative reasons—a leader wanting to set the agenda for a direct report’s work with a coach, the reliance on coaching as a way to help someone be more effective, the pressures from the business to get someone or something “fixed”—there are stated and unstated efforts to influence the coaches. After all, these individuals are peers of other company leaders and, in most cases, direct reports of executive team members. It is not uncommon for the coaches to hear something along the lines of, “I know you’re coaching so and so and you can’t say anything, but . . .” Another challenge is that living in the organizational dynamic, there is a predisposition, tied to objectivity, to want to commiserate or collude with clients about the most recent conflict, reorganization, market shift, or something else.
In addition, the risk existed that an internal coach would decide to leave the organization or, due to the demands of the business, reduce the amount of time dedicated to coaching. As this risk became reality, it became clear that the best approach was to maintain a balance of internal and external coaches, allowing the company to leverage the best of both worlds.
Ultimately the value of context overwhelmed these challenges, partially because the coach, whether internal or external, maintained the idea that “the self is the best tool for help” and set the stage for the self of the client to do the heavy lifting in the relationship, thereby making it more effective.
How should the coaches be selected? How many internal coaches are enough? The first and most obvious group to invite into this new role was the leadership group within the HR department. These individuals were closest to the new initiative given their daily involvement with the HR leader and, as stewards of the company culture, were already proven to be trustworthy and reliable in supporting employees and maintaining confidences.
In addition, and in support of the mandate to develop leaders from within the company, non-HR business leaders were invited and considered to take on the additional responsibility of professional coaching. It was understood that qualified line managers serving as coaches would allow the effort to reach a broader and deeper population of employees. These candidates had to have the willingness to enter a long and continuing involvement, and their capability was assessed by personal interaction, assessment, and feedback from organizational follow-up. It was a formula of self-selection with both peer and management feedback.
Missing from the equation, however, was a formal vetting process or a set of standards to guide coach selection. The invitation was opened to the company leadership because of the belief that those who stepped forward would come from a place of conviction and that with the addition of competence, both existing and learned, there would be a strong and compelling cadre of coaches to offer to the company. Although this turned out to be true in most cases, we didn’t realize that the political dimensions that would lead someone to declare interest in becoming a coach (to gain organizational power, increase prestige, or be a distraction from his or her functional job responsibilities) would naturally surface. After several graduating classes of coaches, additional criteria became clear and have been put into place. For the purpose of preparation and selection, a minimum of fifty hours of experience as a client is required. Also, a demonstrated ability to coach as a manager, even in short, unscheduled sessions, is now a prerequisite. This type of informal coaching is evidence of the manager’s ability to distribute responsibility and create accountability among direct reports.
One key challenge has been building a business case for the process. Whether the coaching is for skill, performance, or development, the target needs to be business relevant, translating appropriately to the overall company goals as well as the needs of the individual. When the overt support of bosses or supervisors is lacking, coaches have been denied a supportive framework for the important work of challenging the client’s purpose, intent, and patterns of behavior. Conversely, when the boss is included in the discussion of the client’s goals, business relevance is a likely outcome, and accountability can be a regular part of the coaching experience. A more robust and thorough client application process, inclusive of the manager’s sign-off, has been put into practice and continues to evolve in an effort to solidify the necessary supportive framework for success in the relationship.
A second challenge is the fast cycle of change, allowing minimal time for reflection at the group level. Coaching has become a touchstone for those in the midst of a high-intensity, “move first, ask later” environment. Not infrequently, coaching is used to restore reflection and understanding when clients feel challenged by the corporate rhythm. As much as reflection is needed, the idea of “going slow to go fast” it is not easily described in terms that are understood by the dominant culture or the parent company. This requires an ongoing and intensive effort on the part of the coaching advocates to translate and interpret the importance and impact of coaching for the business.
Preparation for the coaching initiative was important in at least two major aspects. Initial and ongoing coach education was necessary for the best practice of coaching technique and ethical standards. The education of the coaching clients about appropriate expectations for themselves, their direct reports, and bosses was essential.
To maximize the training experience of new coaches, the HR leader and the director of coaching and leadership development determined that coaching experience needed to be a priority. When they enter their training program, the new coaches are asked to coach as part of a coaching internship. In addition, a coach supervision group exists to challenge and encourage the ongoing development of the coaches. The group, which meets about eight times each year, is a forum for both skill development and the exploration of depth through connection, the discussion of coaching case studies, and learning about organizational and individual dynamics present in the coaching work. It allows a discussion of the current organizational context and themes critical in helping to serve clients from a place of significant awareness and understanding.
The following standards for coach development and continuous learning were created out of this group:
Mirroring experiences of other organizations growing a coaching culture, once TaylorMade invested adequate resources and the necessary internal support for developing a strong coaching culture, it was motivated to take another step. It provided training in coaching skills along with a simple methodology for its managers in order to provide leaders at all levels in the organization with enough skills to engage in regular development conversations among all members of their teams.
Two years into this next wave of coaching, TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company continues to experience the positive impact in its culture and on the bottom line.
Building a coaching culture takes time and intention, and best practices and processes are beginning to consolidate as more organizations experience the value in coaching from the corner office to the team leader. Based on our experiences and confirmed by current research, we have identified these emerging best practices:
The natural evolution of a coaching culture reaches into the managerial layers of the organization, providing a set of skills for managers to operate in the manager-as-coach realms and adopt a coaching mind-set in their work. Mink, Owen, and Mink (1993) foreshadowed this evolution when they wrote about coaching as a major advancement over the traditional management styles of command, control and dominance. Even in the early 1990s, they viewed the effective manager as the one able to acknowledge and empower others by using a coaching approach. Today’s research supports their early suppositions. The Corporate Executive Board (2009) examined the main factors in driving leadership bench strength inside organizations and found that coaching provided by the leader’s direct manager drives bench strength more than any other factors, including 360-degree feedback, peer mentoring, external executive education, action learning, or in-house classroom-based education.
A highly publicized 2011 study by Google aligns with that study. Google spent two years analyzing what the key indicators are in a successful manager in its own organization by examining over ten thousand manager observations to determine and prioritize the key traits. In 2011 it produced the results and reported the top trait as “being a good coach.” Another finding was that one-on-one coaching with problem managers led to a 75 percent improvement in the manager’s performance (“Google’s Eight-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve,” 2011).