A genuine coaching culture cannot be decreed: it is built over time and has to be embodied by the organisation's leaders. Fully embedded in HR strategy and managerial practice, it can strengthen engagement, performance, skills development and leadership potential across the organisation.
In this article, Charlotte Saulny, CEO of Coaching.com, explains how to move from a simple coaching initiative to a genuine organisational culture. She returns to the received ideas that still hold back its adoption, the steps for structuring a coherent approach, the part personality assessment plays, and why coaching matters for high potentials and managers alike.
One central issue emerges: making coaching not a one-off scheme, but a durable way of developing people, teams and collective performance.
An organisation's results improve when a coaching culture forms an integral part of its strategy. But creating a coaching culture takes more than good intentions, or even an official directive. To take root in the organisation, it has to be embodied at the highest level and then spread across the company.
Episode 131 of the podcast The Science of Personality explored how organisations can build a genuine coaching culture. Co-hosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp were joined by Charlotte Saulny, CEO of Coaching.com.
As part of the recent strategic collaboration between Hogan Assessments and Coaching.com, Hogan has been highlighting the way Coaching.com helps people flourish at work.
"Assessments are an extremely powerful tool for coaches, because they let them accelerate the impact they can have within an engagement," Charlotte explains.
What is a coaching culture? How do you put one in place? And why do leaders and organisations alike have every interest in creating an environment that encourages coaching? This article sets out to explore exactly that.
For Charlotte, a coaching culture is a working environment in which coaching principles are deeply embedded in the organisation's values, norms and practices.
"People have taken on board the idea that everyone has something to bring, and that if we give them the means to bring it, the organisation as a whole will be better," she explains.
Creating a coaching culture demands genuine intent along with commitment from the organisation's leaders. Setting values that place individual singularity and individual development at the centre can help leaders spread not only a coaching stance across every level of the company, but also the skills that go with it.
A coaching culture should not be confused with a coaching initiative or programme. A programme can have a start date and an end date. A culture, by contrast, rests on a belief system shared by everyone in the organisation.
For it to be genuinely visible, audible and perceptible throughout the company, putting it in place often calls for change management, continuous communication and buy-in from everyone.
"For it to be genuinely adopted, coaching has to be embodied by the organisation's leaders," Charlotte points out.
She identifies three received ideas about creating a coaching culture that can still stop some leaders from taking the approach up.
The first treats coaching as impractical. Yet coaching grounded in assessment tools can have a positive impact on practically every measurable indicator of a company's performance.
A second received idea holds that coaching is only for people struggling with performance. In fact, where managers hold coaching skills, organisations generally see greater employee satisfaction, better talent retention and higher productivity.
A third received idea treats coaching as a practice separate from, even opposed to, performance management. In reality, coaching improves performance among leaders and their teams alike.
Understanding and getting past these received ideas is a first step. What remains is knowing how to build a coaching culture in concrete terms.
Before anything else, organisations have to ask themselves several questions: why does creating a coaching culture matter to the business? How does this work fit with the organisation's values? In what way does it serve its strategic and operational objectives?
Interrogating the "why" clarifies how coaching should be used and the value it can create.
Charlotte identifies several elements for embedding coaching durably in organisational culture:
Charlotte illustrates coaching's impact on engagement through the example of a large technology company.
To start with, engagement scores were measured among the people reporting to 200 managers, in order to establish a baseline. A first group of 100 managers then received six coaching sessions, while a second group of 100 managers received none.
By the end of the programme, engagement scores had risen among the people reporting to the coached managers. Among the people in the control group, by contrast, no rise in engagement scores was observed.
"Receiving coaching helped those managers become better leaders for their teams," Charlotte explains. "Data of this kind is extremely valuable when it comes to winning leadership buy-in."
"Personality profiles tell me how I can best coach you," Charlotte explains.
Some people, for instance, are more inclined than others to resist feedback. A coach with precise, scientifically validated personality data can both anticipate that resistance and work out the best way past it.
These insights become particularly powerful when the coach understands their own personality data as well as that of the person they are supporting.
Personality assessment can therefore enrich coaching and the development of leadership potential considerably. It moves past a generic approach to understand the preferences, behaviours and reactions liable to appear during development.
Beyond logistical considerations such as geographical location or how often sessions take place, it is also essential to understand what the participant expects from their coach, in order to create a coaching relationship that fits.
"For coaching to work, the quality of the relationship is absolutely essential," Charlotte observes.
Coaching should not be reserved for people who are underperforming.
You only have to look at sport: the highest-performing athletes have all had coaches.
Pragmatically, managers may even get a better return on investment by devoting more time, energy and effort to coaching their best people than by concentrating all their attention on those who are struggling.
So organisations have a lesson to pass on to leaders and managers alike: the people already performing well, and those marked out as high potentials, deserve support too.
"Everyone can progress, everyone can make a contribution," Charlotte says.
But leaders do not only need to receive coaching. They also need to learn its skills.
Charlotte points out that coaching skills are useful to everyone and should not be reserved for executive coaches.
"Taking a coaching approach with someone can genuinely help unlock their potential and encourage their development," she explains.
Asking questions to help a person reach their own conclusions can be every bit as powerful as handing them insights, recommendations or ideas directly.
"Hogan observes that once managers have experienced coaching themselves, they gradually start using those skills with their own direct reports, because they have personally experienced the power and impact of the approach."
This gradual spread of coaching skills is a particularly interesting lever for team transformation and for developing sustainable management.
The short answer is yes.
An environment built on coaching values curiosity and learning opportunities.
Charlotte sums up the philosophy this way: "A coaching culture is a culture of curiosity: curiosity first, critical thinking second."
When leaders sign up to the approach and support comes from the top of the organisation, coaching can be embedded in the company's values in a way that encourages everyone's development.
"A coaching culture cannot be imposed. It appears when leaders embody a coaching environment themselves," Charlotte explains.
Coaching is particularly effective when it is embedded across the whole employee life cycle: from joining the organisation through to talent development and leadership development.
It thus becomes a component of HR strategy rather than an isolated intervention, contributing simultaneously to talent management, skills development and the building of leadership potential.
Charlotte recommends that organisations restate regularly why coaching matters and what belonging to a coaching culture means in concrete terms.
How quickly the culture shifts will probably be perceptible sooner in a company of 300 people than in an organisation of 30,000. But whatever the size of the company, word of mouth helps accelerate that cultural transformation.
A few months of consistent, continuous communication, backed by leaders who embody the expected behaviours themselves, can be enough to set positive changes in motion.
"Make sure your leaders, at every level of the organisation, are encouraged to become better coaches and have the skills they need to support their teams effectively," Charlotte recommends.
This approach does not mean leaders have to become professional coaches. It is rather about weaving a coaching stance into their everyday leadership and management practice.
The organisations that make the best job of this transformation are those that win the buy-in of managers and leaders, so that they gradually spread this coaching dynamic across the whole company.
Charlotte believes artificial intelligence should gradually enrich certain dimensions of coaching, and may even replace some of its components.
She nonetheless urges organisations to recognise AI's power and to define precisely the parameters governing the use of these tools in development work.
"How is coaching going to evolve? What should its role be in this new world?" she asks.
"What distinguishes us from artificial intelligence is our humanity. So how can we lean further into everything that makes us profoundly human?"
Creating a coaching culture is not simply a matter of running more sessions. It is about changing how the organisation thinks about developing its people, about leadership and about performance.
When leaders embody a coaching stance themselves, when managers acquire the skills they need to develop their teams, and when the schemes form part of a genuine talent management strategy, coaching can become a powerful engine of organisational transformation.
Personality assessment adds a further depth in this context. By giving coaches, managers and leaders a more precise understanding of behaviours, motivations and individual dynamics, it makes support more personal and accelerates the development of leadership potential.
Paired with a coherent HR strategy, assessment and development, coaching and skills development thus help strengthen engagement, team transformation and the quality of leadership.
Ultimately, the real value of a coaching culture lies in its capacity to build organisations where everyone has the conditions they need to progress, to contribute fully and to sustain lasting performance.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: How to Create a Coaching Culture
