Employees today aren’t motivated by money alone. A sense of purpose, the accomplishment of personal goals, and passion-fueled work life are prerequisites for most. For companies to retain talent, they must find ways to support and help individuals reach their highest potential — and coaching is a great tool to do just that.
Business owners and solopreneurs know that establishing an organization takes more than just pep talk and seminars. To build a company with strong roots and sustainable growth, organizations use business coaching to invest in our employees and help them develop. In this guide, we’ll explain the many benefits of coaching in an organization and how it all works.
What is organizational coaching?
Organizational coaching is a company improvement strategy. It focuses on internal business procedures and targets systemic change to transform the company from the inside. Usually, coaches in this field have industry experience and are equipped to provide knowledgeable guidance.
Organizational coaching can happen in a variety of ways depending on the company's size and business needs. Here are some examples:
- Integrated coaching: Organizational coaching is integrated into a wider training program already in place. This type of coaching focuses on helping employees learn new skills and competencies.
- Executive coaching: Also known as leadership coaching, this style of coaching targets managers and other higher-level employees and focuses on boosting leadership skills and professional development.
- Team coaching: This method of group coaching helps improve teamwork by having team members collaborate to accomplish a common goal.
- Online coaching: Many organizations have turned to online platforms to host training and coaching initiatives in an increasingly digital world. This method gives employees much flexibility about where and when they can be coached.
While the goal of a business coach is often to help the organization build long-term solutions, it’s not always a quick process. These coaches help employees identify and achieve objectives aligned with improving the company and benefiting other employees. It seeks to boost workplace enthusiasm, increase employee retention rates and accountability, and provide specialized support for each business.
How does organizational coaching work?
Mentoring in organizations can be done by internal or external coaches and may include one-on-one sessions, group sessions, and workshops. These can be formal coaching sessions from external coaching professionals or internal managers.
Employees usually receive coaching when they’ve just joined, recently been promoted, are in a senior position, or have high-performing, responsible roles. But coaching helps empower coachees of all skill and experience levels within a company. This career development method can boost employee growth, improve individual performance, hone specific competencies, or teach new skills.
Organizations with a company culture that values employee engagement, professional development, and great communication skills can benefit from coaching employees. These training programs can be in the form of several hours of coaching per month or more specific and goal-focused adoption of new skills such as leadership development.
Now that we have an idea of how organizational coaching functions, let’s take a look at the top five benefits of coaching:
1. Employee retention
Good coaching can boost employee retention in two distinct ways: It makes team members feel valued and provides professional development opportunities. In the coaching process, employee engagement often increases as each team member is given individual attention and feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. This increases their self-awareness and understanding of the impact they make on the company.
Because coaching is much more personal than a day-to-day work interaction with a senior, it demonstrates to the employee that we care about their well-being and want to create a work environment that supports them and their growth.
2. Improving performance
Organizational coaching helps team members set goals and reach them. This type of leadership coaching empowers employees by giving them problem-solving tools so they feel responsible for their own goal-setting and performance and have the resources to succeed.
3. Building teamwork
Teams that are coached together, stay together. Coaching culture within the office helps teams communicate assertively and listen actively. When coupled with a better understanding of the organization’s goals and purpose, this improvement in communication skills makes teams effective and builds rapport.
4. Making team members feel at home
A large part of the value of coaching comes from increased employee engagement. Engaged employees have excellent time management skills and will improve profitability because they’re aligned with the company’s culture, vision, and purpose. When employees feel comfortable in their work environment, everyone excels.
5. Accountability
Amazing things happen when employees understand and appreciate their value within an organization. Team members aware of their own roles also understand how they’re accountable to the rest of their team, leading to better performance and relationships, and a sense of belonging to the company and team.
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How to introduce coaching in your organization
With the benefits of coaching now clear to us, we should take some time to determine how we can best implement it to fit our business needs. Here are the five steps to implement it for maximum coaching effectiveness:
- Determine the objective of your coaching program: What’s the purpose of adopting a coaching program, and what do we want to achieve? Who will benefit from the training, and in what way? Ask and answer those questions.
- Set measurable goals: Set goals and milestones and ensure progress can be measured. This helps especially when we have set timelines because it’ll help us plan our pace and allow us to make sustained and calculated progress. We can gauge if we’re on track. It’ll be helpful to plan how we’ll communicate the goals and track metrics.
- Have a vision: What would it look like if the program was successful? What would change? What would we see more or less of? Having a vision gives a sense of purpose and keeps everyone motivated.
- Decide if you want internal or external coaches (or both): It’s crucial that we establish the “who” and “what” of the process. Who will coach? Who will be coached? How often will the training occur, and will it happen one-to-one or in groups? When answering these questions, we should clearly assign roles to everyone involved and ensure they’re aware of their responsibilities.
- Set deadlines: Map out a plan with a concrete end date. Make adjustments along the way, if needed, but ensure that the deadlines still serve us. Setting an expectation for when the program will end will motivate and keep everyone productive.
Changing an organization from the inside out is easier said than done, but organizational coaching gives us a solid framework to make this happen.
Perhaps we’ll still need to sell this idea to the leadership by presenting clear outcomes and a vision of the end result. But it’ll be a worthy battle to fight.
In a competitive and constantly changing industry, we know it can be difficult for small businesses and solopreneurs to stay afloat. Let’s help you out with our all-in-one client relationship management tool.
