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Organizational outcomes improve when a coaching culture becomes an integral part of business strategy. But creating a coaching culture does not rely only on good intentions, or even on an official decision. It must be embodied by leaders, from the top of the organization through to operational teams.
This article explains what a coaching culture is, how to build one, how to measure its impact, and why it concerns all leaders — not only professional coaches or employees in difficulty.
For executives, HR leaders, and Talent Management professionals, the challenge is strategic: a coaching culture fosters growth, curiosity, accountability, engagement, and sustainable performance.
Organizational outcomes improve when a coaching culture is part of business strategy. Creating a coaching culture, however, requires more than good intentions, or even a formal mandate. A coaching culture must be modeled from the top of the organization.
In episode 131 of The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Charlotte Saulny, CEO of Coaching.com, about how organizations can create a coaching culture.
With the recent strategic collaboration between Hogan Assessments and Coaching.com, Hogan says it wants to highlight how Coaching.com helps people thrive at work.
According to Charlotte Saulny, personality inventories are a remarkable tool for helping coaches accelerate the impact they can have in coaching engagements.
This article explains what a coaching culture is, how to build one, and why all leaders and all organizations should embrace a coaching environment.
Short definition — Coaching culture: A coaching culture is a work environment in which the principles of coaching — listening, questioning, development, accountability, and feedback — are integrated into the organization’s values, norms, and practices.
For Charlotte Saulny, a coaching culture is a work environment in which coaching principles are deeply embedded in the organization’s values, norms, and practices.
She explains that people then adopt the mindset that every individual has a contribution to make. And if the organization enables each person to make that contribution, the organization becomes better.
Creating a coaching culture requires intention and commitment from the organization’s leaders. Defining values that prioritize uniqueness and growth can help leaders spread a coaching mindset — and a coaching skill set — at every level of the organization.
A coaching culture is not the same thing as a coaching initiative or program. A program can start and end. A culture, by contrast, stems from a belief system shared by the members of the organization as a whole.
For this culture to be seen, heard, and felt throughout the company, it often requires change management, clear communication, and buy-in from everyone in the organization.
Short definition — Coaching mindset: A coaching mindset consists in believing that people can learn, grow, and contribute more when the leader creates the conditions for reflection, autonomy, and accountability.
In practice, a coaching culture is not limited to training a few managers. It transforms the way the organization talks about performance, development, feedback, and potential.
According to Charlotte Saulny, coaching must be embodied by leaders within the organization in order to be truly adopted.
She identifies three misconceptions about creating a coaching culture that can prevent leaders from embracing this approach.
A first misconception is the belief that coaching is not practical.
In reality, coaching based on personality inventories can have a positive impact on almost every measurable business indicator.
For an executive, this means coaching should not be seen as an abstract or purely relational initiative. When it is structured and connected to the organization’s challenges, it can support performance, engagement, retention, and leadership effectiveness.
A second misconception is the belief that coaching is only intended for underperformers.
Yet when managers have coaching skills, organizations generally observe higher employee satisfaction, better retention, and increased productivity.
High potentials, experts, new managers, and experienced executives can all benefit from coaching, precisely because coaching is aimed at growth rather than punitive correction.
A third misconception is the belief that coaching is separate from performance management, or even opposed to it.
In reality, coaching improves the performance of leaders and their teams. It helps people clarify their objectives, understand their behaviors, identify obstacles, and build more effective action plans.
Short definition — Coaching based on personality inventories: Coaching based on personality inventories uses reliable psychometric data to help a person understand their strengths, behavioral risks, motivations, and impact on others.
Understanding these misconceptions is a first step. The next question is how to build a coaching culture in concrete terms.
To create a coaching culture, organizations must begin by asking fundamental questions.
Why is creating a coaching culture important for your organization? How does this culture align with organizational values and business objectives? How does it support them?
Asking these “why” questions helps organizations clarify how they want to use coaching.
Charlotte Saulny proposes several key steps for effectively integrating coaching into organizational culture.
The first step is to write a coaching charter.
This statement may include a definition of coaching culture, the philosophy supporting the cultural change, how coaching will and will not be used, and the choice of internal, external, or blended coaching.
Short definition — Coaching charter: A coaching charter is a reference document that formalizes the vision, principles, uses, and boundaries of coaching within an organization.
In concrete terms, a coaching charter helps avoid ambiguity. It specifies whether coaching is a tool for development, performance support, cultural transformation, leadership preparation, or career transition.
It can also clarify what coaching is not: a sanction, therapy, a disciplinary procedure, or a substitute for management.
The second step is to design the coaching architecture.
The plan can specify which level of manager will receive which type of coaching, and when. For example, directors and more senior levels may benefit from external individual coaching. Senior managers and managers may benefit from group coaching in cross-functional contexts.
Short definition — Coaching architecture: Coaching architecture refers to the organized structure that defines the target populations, coaching formats, intervention moments, resources mobilized, and associated objectives.
For HR leaders, this architecture is essential. It makes it possible to move from an opportunistic approach to coaching toward a coherent strategy aligned with the employee lifecycle, leadership priorities, and development needs.
The third step is to measure the impact of coaching and its return on investment.
Direct feedback from participants should be combined with 360 feedback in order to determine the changes others observe in the participant’s reputation. Of course, business outcomes are among the most powerful indicators to measure.
Charlotte Saulny shares a story about the impact of coaching on employee engagement in a large technology organization.
At the start, baseline engagement scores were collected from the employees of 200 managers. One group of 100 managers received six coaching sessions. Another group of 100 managers received none.
After the sessions, engagement scores increased among employees whose managers had received coaching. Employees in the control group did not experience an increase in their engagement scores.
According to Charlotte Saulny, receiving coaching helped managers become better leaders for others. She adds that this type of data is valuable when seeking executive buy-in.
Short definition — Coaching ROI: Coaching ROI refers to the value created by coaching, measured through indicators such as engagement, retention, performance, internal mobility, leadership quality, or business outcomes.
In practice, measuring coaching moves it beyond the realm of simple positive perception. The organization can then demonstrate its impact on culture, leadership, and performance.
According to Charlotte Saulny, personality profiles provide clues about the best way to coach someone.
For example, some people tend to be more resistant to feedback than others. A coach with nuanced, scientifically validated personality data can both anticipate this resistance and move beyond it.
These insights emerge when the coach understands both their own personality data and the participant’s.
In addition to logistical factors, such as geography or session frequency, understanding what the participant expects from their coach is essential for successful coach-participant matching.
Charlotte Saulny emphasizes that, for coaching to work, the quality of the relationship is extremely important.
Short definition — Coach-participant matching: Coach-participant matching refers to the process of pairing a person with a coach whose style, experience, posture, and methods meet their development needs.
For a leader, personality inventories do not replace the coaching relationship. They accelerate it. They give the coach and participant a shared language for discussing behaviors, motivations, resistance, and levers for change.
Coaching should not be limited to underperformers.
Think about it: the highest-performing athletes have all had coaches. From a pragmatic perspective, managers will get a better return on investment if they devote more time, energy, and effort to coaching top performers rather than underperforming employees.
Organizations need to teach their leaders and managers that high performers and high potentials deserve coaching too.
According to Charlotte Saulny, everyone can grow, and everyone can make a contribution.
Not only do all leaders need coaching, but all leaders must also learn coaching skills. Charlotte Saulny explains that coaching skills benefit everyone, not only executive coaches.
Adopting a coaching approach with someone can significantly help unlock their potential and growth. Asking questions to help people reach their own conclusions can be just as useful as offering insights, suggestions, or ideas.
Charlotte Saulny observes that when managers have experienced coaching themselves, they gradually begin to use these skills with their direct reports because they have experienced the power and impact of this approach.
Short definition — Coaching skills: Coaching skills include active listening, questioning, feedback, goal clarification, accountability, and helping people gain awareness.
In concrete business terms, training leaders in coaching skills does not mean asking them to become professional coaches. It means helping them integrate a development-oriented posture into their everyday management practice.
The short answer is yes.
A coaching environment celebrates curiosity and the opportunity to learn. According to Charlotte Saulny, a coaching culture is first and foremost a curious culture: curious first, critical second.
When leadership buy-in and top-level support are present, organizations can integrate coaching into their values in a way that elevates everyone.
Charlotte Saulny reminds us that a coaching culture cannot be imposed by decree. It develops when leaders embody a coaching environment.
Coaching is most effective when it is integrated across the entire employee lifecycle: from onboarding to talent development and leadership development.
Short definition — Employee lifecycle: The employee lifecycle refers to all stages of a person’s experience in the organization, from onboarding to development, mobility, leadership, or departure.
For organizations, this integration is decisive. A coaching culture is not a peripheral benefit. It becomes a coherent way to support performance, learning, and talent growth.
Charlotte Saulny advises organizations to continually reinforce the message explaining why coaching matters and what it means to belong to a coaching culture.
The pace of cultural change will probably be felt more quickly in an organization of 300 people than in an organization of 30,000. But word of mouth accelerates cultural change regardless of the organization’s size.
Positive change can emerge in just a few months, provided communication is consistent and reinforced by leadership role modeling.
According to Charlotte Saulny, organizations must ensure that their leaders, at every level, are encouraged to become better coaches and receive the skills needed to coach effectively.
This mindset is not intended to turn leaders into professional coaches. Rather, it is about integrating a coaching approach into their leadership practice.
The organizations that succeed best in this transformation obtain buy-in from managers and leaders in order to spread the energy of coaching throughout the company.
Short definition — Leadership role modeling: Leadership role modeling refers to the ability of executives and managers to embody the behaviors they want to see spread throughout the organization.
In practice, employees believe in a coaching culture when they see their leaders asking better questions, listening more, acting on feedback, and genuinely supporting development.
Charlotte Saulny believes that AI is likely to augment, and even replace, certain parts of coaching.
She encourages organizations to recognize the power of AI and define precise parameters for the use of AI tools in development.
She raises two essential questions: How is coaching evolving? What should the role of coaching be in this new world?
According to her, what distinguishes us from AI is our humanity. The question therefore becomes: how can we rely on what makes us deeply human?
Short definition — AI and coaching: AI applied to coaching can support certain tasks, such as personalization, analysis, or follow-up, but it does not replace the human quality of the relationship, listening, discernment, and trust.
For an executive or HR leader, the challenge is not to choose between human coaching and AI. It is to determine what AI can usefully strengthen while protecting the human dimension that makes coaching transformational.
Creating a coaching culture requires a clear vision, visible executive commitment, coherent architecture, skills spread across all levels, and rigorous measurement of impact.
Organizations must also integrate personality inventories in a relevant way. These tools help coaches, managers, and participants better understand strengths, motivations, resistance to feedback, and levers for development.
In concrete terms, a successful coaching culture can be recognized through several signs: leaders ask more questions, employees take on more responsibility, feedback circulates more easily, high potentials receive support, and development is no longer reserved for situations of difficulty.
A coaching culture then becomes a true human performance system.
A coaching culture cannot be decreed. It is built through example, consistency, communication, and the daily practice of leaders. It begins when executives model a posture of curiosity, listening, questioning, and development.
For executives, HR leaders, and Talent Management professionals, coaching should be considered a strategic lever, not a one-off intervention. When integrated into business strategy, the employee lifecycle, and leadership development, it improves engagement, retention, performance, and the organization’s ability to adapt.
Hogan Assessments personality inventories, combined with coaching platforms and practices such as those offered by Coaching.com, make it possible to accelerate awareness, personalize support, and strengthen the impact of coaching.
In a world where AI is already transforming development practices, coaching culture reminds us of a fundamental truth: sustainable performance depends on the quality of human conversations, trust, curiosity, and leaders’ ability to help others grow.
