Sparking Organizational Transformation: Unleashing the Power of Coaching for a Thriving, Inclusive Culture.
Donna Louise Fitzpatrick and Jacqueline Kerr
Imagine a workplace where every employee has access to coaching, helping them reach their full potential, professionally and personally. A workplace where diversity, equity, and inclusion are not just buzzwords, but a daily reality. Unfortunately, coaching is often seen as a luxury and limited to a select few employees such as executives, or it is viewed upon as a performance tool, associating it with failure rather than growth. These approaches result in companies missing out on the untapped talent of their employees, and their employees’ potential remaining unrealized.
Some companies have started investing in 1:1 or group coaching external to the organization, as an employee benefit to support work-life balance. Coaching has also been employed in teams to understand one another’s strengths and weaknesses, to build stronger relationships, and to sharpen collaboration skills. But few companies have invested in coaching as a company-wide business tool.
Workhuman is at the cutting edge of employee experience, with Donna Louise Fitzpatrick having developed a coaching community internally with the goal of inspiring a coaching culture to create a more inclusive work environment. Changing corporate culture presents its challenges, but companies without a supportive thriving culture will lose diverse talent, lose the ability to innovate, and lose their competitive edge.
When coaching is internalized as a collective business tool rather than focusing on individual mindset, it can play an important role in driving culture change. This article presents some key steps to create a thriving coaching culture, that improves employee satisfaction, engagement, performance, productivity, and business growth, based on the Workhuman experience and culture change best practices.
7 Steps to Create an Unstoppable Coaching Culture:
1. Igniting Integration: From the C-suite to the Frontlines
Fuel your organization's transformation by making coaching everyone's business. Executive leaders need to champion coaching as a strategic tool that drives performance, productivity, diversity, inclusion, retention, and employee engagement.
Integrate coaching throughout the organization, with the expertise of an accredited coach, who can support the development of internal talent into professional workplace coaches. When coaching is part of the culture, it creates a learning and growth mindset. Further, when coaches are available to support employees long-term, they can be important accountability partners for behavior change and habit formation which can then support change in social norms.
2. Trust, Empower, Excel: Unleashing Coaching Capacity
Empower your coaches to empower your organization. Develop a diverse cohort of trained coaches who create a safe and supportive environment. These coaches, with varied identities and language skills, partner with employees’ based on their specific needs and preferences. When coaching is an internal support, offering confidentiality assurances, in the form of confidentiality agreements are paramount. Providing continuous assessment, ongoing training, and up to date resources to support coaches in their expanding role is key to the long-term success of the program. It also provides an opportunity for ongoing learning for those who have benefited from coaching and want to become an expert.
3. Compassionate Accountability: Developing Coach Managers
Equip your managers to create an environment where employees feel heard, valued, and supported. Remote and hybrid work has made managing employees more challenging and authoritarian management styles are no longer effective. Employees are seeking meaningful connections with their managers and a sense of purpose in their work. By developing coaching skills such as listening to understand, managers can effectively communicate with their team members, build trust, foster a growth and learning culture that celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion. When managers use coaching skills, such as asking questions instead of providing solutions, they can empower employees to develop greater problem-solving skills and unlock their employees’ full potential.
Managers will need to learn how to use coaching as a tool so that they can apply it in the appropriate situations. Coaching does not replace sponsorship, mentoring, or candid feedback. But as managers learn to assess their employees’ needs more effectively, and employees learn to express those needs in a safe environment, the right tool can be more easily identified for the right time.
4. HR's Secret Weapon: Coaching for Engagement and Growth
Elevate your HR strategies with coaching. Beyond performance management, coaching enhances employee engagement, retention, succession planning, and leadership development. For emerging leaders in ERGs, often volunteers, coaching provides guidance on setting expectations and boundaries. Coaching can also provide a safe space for people with rising identities to be received with compassion. It fosters stress coping skills, resilience, and healthy work habits to reduce burnout and promote work-life balance. Integrate coaching into the onboarding process to help provide a greater sense of purpose in work, support job crafting and values alignment, and set the tone for communicating needs and work style preferences.
5. Revolutionizing Change: Coaching as a Catalyst for Transformation
Harness the power of coaching to embrace change and drive innovation. Culture change is a challenging and transformative journey. For any change to be successful, foundational conditions of safe learning and growth are needed. Coaching can support the development of these conditions, while also addressing challenges such as uncertainty, fear, change fatigue or change cynicism.
Systems change also can include loss of power and privilege for the dominant group which results in system stabilizers who want to maintain the status quo. Changemakers often overlook this resistance. Coaches, however, can support this transition by recognizing the strengths of the old system that could be built upon, helping groups process the perceived loss, and providing perspective on the benefits of a new emerging system.
Change can also generate new conflicts as diversity of ideas are fully embraced. Coaches can play an important role in facilitating and resolving conflict. Coaches are skilled ‘perspective takers’ who can provide important insights from multiple groups and can suggest opportunities for alignment. Coaches can also help bring together groups to collaborate and drive change forward collectively. In particular, a move towards shared decision making and end user input is important for ongoing innovation and moving organizational change to becoming a core activity rather than a peripheral effort. Coaches can lend their facilitation skills to this more equal governance approach.
6. Connecting with social issues: Coaching as a tool for social impact
Leverage the skills of coaches to support community change. Companies are increasingly expected to address social issues, support customers in their communities, and recognize the interaction between work and life in their employees. For individual employees, coaching can support the integration of work-life balance by developing deeper understanding of the demands faced by employees at home and in their communities. Further, coaches can help bridge the connection with social issues by facilitating community listening sessions using empowering listening and supporting emotion processing.
7. The Journey Continues: Commitment to Lifelong Growth
Cultivate resilience and burnout-proof your organization by making coaching an ongoing development tool. Coaching is often a safety net in times of crisis, but moving coaching into an ongoing development tool will help burnout proof an organization and develop greater employee resilience. It is important to acknowledge that coaching is not always the solution for persistent mental health problems and that not every employee is ready for coaching. When there is a commitment to the coaching journey through the enrollment process, the matching process, and the ongoing learning process then employees and the organization can maximize their benefits.
Although it is still early days, Donna Louise Fitzpatrick’s Workhuman internal coaching initiative has already yielded highly positive results for both coaches and employees. Coaches have shared that their professional and personal relationships have been enriched. Employees have also provided positive feedback, reporting that they have gained a realistic roadmap to achieve their desired goals. These goals have commonly included accelerating their return to work from maternity leave (by building confidence and connections), determining their next career step (rather than simply following the traditional route to success of becoming a people manager), and gaining the confidence to apply for a promotion (which they have since obtained). Workhuman is committed to an inclusive workplace culture and coaching is an important tool in their comprehensive culture change efforts.
By embracing coaching as a collective business tool, organizations can create a thriving and inclusive culture that attracts diverse talent, fuels innovation, and maintains a competitive edge. It's time to spark your organizational transformation through the power of coaching.
Donna Louise Fitzpatrick is a celebrated Global Talent Development Leader with a decade-plus of transformative experience in L&D and professional coaching, headhunted by Meta, Facebook, and Twitter to shape talent development strategies. Donna Louise's career has left an indelible mark across these tech giants, as well as Workhuman. Beyond coaching and training, she's a sought-after international speaker, podcast guest, and contributor to industry publications. Her unique fusion of IT, Learning and Development, and accredited coaching skills positions her as a dynamic thought leader who champions innovative and inclusive learning experiences. Please feel warmly invited to get in touch, and together, let's spark transformative change!
Dr. Jacqueline Kerr is a world-recognized behavior change scientist, community advocate, and TEDx speaker. She is in the top 1% of most cited scientists worldwide. Her federally funded and peer reviewed research empowered leaders to create healthier schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and even government policies with the goal of reducing health disparities. She founded Leading Real Change to apply this evidence based approach to business leadership to create thriving workplace cultures for all. If you need a thought-partner, book your free consultation call with Jacqueline at www.leading-real-change.com
