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How to Create a Coaching Culture: A Practical Introduction

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Management approaches and workplace culture help determine employee productivity, morale, talent acquisition and retention, and organizational adaptability. How to Create a Coaching Culture is a practical guide to embedding effective coaching behaviours within an organization to empower and engage employees to perform at their best. Using a combination of practical tools, assessments, case studies and examples, it provides guidance on how to plan and develop a strategy aligned to your organization and its goals, engage the board to secure 'buy-in', and how to effectively measure and evaluate initiatives in every stage of the employee lifecycle.

This fully updated second edition of How to Create a Coaching Culture contains new material on promoting employee engagement, reinventing performance reviews, and new and updated case studies from HarperCollins, British Airways and Leanintuit. Online resources include a series of downloadable templates and tools to use in practice, including a board report, communication strategy, development plan, and pre- and post-course training assessment.

HR Fundamentals is a series of succinct, practical guides for students and those in the early stages of their HR careers. They are endorsed by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the UK professional body for HR and people development, which has over 145,000 members worldwide.

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

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About the author

Gillian Jones

22 books4 followers
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Profile Image for Karen ⊰✿.
1,611 reviews
December 21, 2018
This is a good introduction to coaching and to what a coaching culture may look like. Although it is entitled a practical introduction, that part of the book was a little underdone - and that is perhaps because culture is by definition all about your organisation and how you can develop it is not going to be the same as how another organisation can.
The authors have spent time working with organisations to build a coaching culture, and so most of the book felt like it was their stories. For those who don't work in HR/OD or are new to the area, this may be quite useful and insightful.
Personally, there were no real takeaways for me. It wasn't a bad book, it may just mean that this book is a little too introductory for those who have worked in this field for a while.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for providing me with an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
Profile Image for Annarella.
14.1k reviews160 followers
August 10, 2018
A very interesting and useful books, full of examples and tool. I'm starting to work on the coaching of people and I found a lot of information that can help me to improve the way I work.
Recommended!
Many thanks to Kogan Page and Netgalley for this ARC
Profile Image for Jenn "JR".
609 reviews109 followers
October 18, 2018
I confess - I am not an HR professional, but I have been taking courses in leadership & management all year so was very interested in this topic. I thought that this book would be a quick read -- I was quite wrong!

The authors have provided an incredibly detailed, thoughtful, comprehensive and well structured discussion around culture, coaching at different levels, employee life-cycle and change management.

The basic premise here is that people have the ability to solve most of their own problems, and given the support or empowerment, will do so. "[A]utonomy, mastery and purpose, and these factors are the foundation blocks of empowerment and so too of engagement."

Employee engagement is critical for high performance -- engaged, fulfilled employees do better work, take initiative and work harder. Key factors of disengagement include. "1. Not feeling respected. 2 Not respecting their manager. 3 Not feeling valued. 4 Having their ideas discounted. 5 Goals and expectations unclear. 6 Organizational values not being lived. 7 Manager not encouraging team work/collaboration. 8 Personal expression not valued. 9 Lack of empowerment. 10 No useful or constructive feedback."

Coaching culture helps people feel engaged, connected, respected and gain the confidence they need to make things happen via discussions with a coach, vis a vis a model identified as GROW (Goal Reality Options Will) early in the book.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, coaching is seen as a privilege and training is seen as the only form of development. Training, however, is transactional while coaching is ongoing development that happens over time. Many managers don't have "time" to devote to managing their employees and "chicken out" of the actual coaching tasks, resulting in a lot of organizations that talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.

"Every phone conversation, meeting, written report, process followed provides an opportunity for coaching, and when this mindset is achieved, then employees welcome the opportunity to have short discussions with their manager about what they are doing that is right and what could be done differently."

The authors point out that "culture" has only been in use in organizational behavior discussions the last 20 years or so, and they define it as: "the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organization’s view of itself and its environment."

When vision is cloudy and employees don't connect the work they are doing with the mission, goals and values of the company -- this is a good opportunity for making a change by clearly articulating values, strategy and vision and linking that to all the roles in your company. Don't use coaching as a way of "fixing" problem employees: "Creating a climate for coaching works better when you are looking to inspire high performance rather than mitigate poor performance."

The book walks through how to create a business case for a coaching culture -- including identifying sub-groups or teams where it is most likely to succeed (ie, they are using some coaching practices already). A 100-day plan is outlined as an example for implementing steps toward building a coaching culture.

Each chapter includes lists of thoughtful questions to guide change managers in developing their own map of the organization and plan for requirements for their constituents. There's a solid discussion on the difference between finding internal coaches and external coaches at the executive level, and how to manage the needs of the organization against the needs of the individual in the coaching process.

My chief take-away from the book is an outline of the process that the book describes:

"Ten stages of a coaching culture

Learn
1. Understand organization
2. Link to organizational objectives and strategy
Assess current reality
Validate the need for change

Define
3. Identify vision and purpose
4. Gain management support
Define a destination goal for culture
Focus on win-win

Create
5. Isolate where to engage first
6. Create measurements
Identify low-risk area to experiment
Clarify what success means
Identify how ROI will be measured

Experiment
7. Introduce pilot
8. Evaluate results and publish–Visual Wall
Identify learning and insights
Decide how you will act on the learning and insights

Learn
9. Introduce the next phase
10. Maintain momentum health check
Celebrate small wins
Implement actions from insights
Iterate and improve "

You need this book! The lists of questions and tools provide amazing basis for developing your own organization. Highly recommend this for anyone interested in the subject of organizational change, coaching and leadership.
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