Organizational coaching focuses on improving the culture that exists across teams, both up and down the hierarchy. Improvements to organizational performance are made with coaching, training and facilitation interventions for influential individual leaders and their teams. This almost always includes the executive and leadership teams. We provide key executive and team leaders individual coaching to help them form their authentic leadership styles that align with organizational values and aspirational behavioral norms. As a part of an organizational coaching engagement, it’s common to extend our coaching support for these leaders by providing facilitation and training to guide their teams in establishing new, more performance-focused, operating norms.

Coaching a team starts by consulting with the team leader, directly observing some team meetings, and conducting a team 360 assessment. With the leader we help the team establish a clear picture of which obstacles to team performance should be addressed with behavioral changes and new behavioral group norms. The coach then facilitates the team to reach consensus on what motivates them to change and what priority they give to each of the changes identified. Once this focus is established, the coach can facilitate meetings to help establish new norms, provide training on various tools the team can incorporate into their engagement and provide spot-coaching for key individuals to help them come into alignment with these new norms. Alongside this work, the coach stays in close contact with the team leader, on both a consulting and executive coaching basis, supporting their work to manage to these new norms and to build up their personal leadership identity and style in the process.

Organizational coaching focuses on building an intentional leadership culture that reinforces best practices across all leadership activities and forums in the organization. It supplements and leverages leadership development training and coaching given to individuals.

We find that organizational coaching engagements are more successful when the top leaders (e.g., CEO and executive team) receive executive coaching to help them personally align and role model to the new performance norms they invest in bringing to the company culture. In addition it is a good idea to give influential leaders in senior management (e.g., Director and above) some executive coaching so that they can also align and role model these changes effectively to middle management. Most cultural change initiatives fail if those changes are not spread with intention to middle management.

Executed well against goals that matter to high-value employees, organizational coaching does positively improve employee retention and satisfaction. Helping teams and leaders improve their performance norms tends to invite greater engagement as well with the entire employee base.

Organizational coaching goals are established through a combination of executive interviews and team 360 assessments that tend to surface the primary obstacles to organizational performance. In addition it’s important to identify any metrics that the organizational coaching engagement is designed to improve. From these assessments we work with leaders to reach consensus on the top 3-6 improvements that can be expected to remove obstacles to performance, improve key metrics and elevate the leadership culture overall. Some common goals include improvements in: Goal-Setting and Accountability, Emotional Intelligence, Collaboration, Decision-making and Consensus, Strategic Focus, Systems Thinking, Psychological Safety, Difficult Conversations, Inclusive Leadership, Mentoring/Coaching and Empowering Leadership Styles, Purpose and Visionary Leadership.

Our organizational coaching strategy focuses on creating cultural behavioral shifts one goal at a time. By taking this “nudge” approach to culture change, leaders, teams and individual employees are able to adapt to the change and integrate new behaviors into the culture in a focused way. The key components of success are:

• executive behavior change and role modeling
• leader buy-in

A good intervention “nudge” will produce visible results within 3 months and may take as much as 6-9 months (depending on the size of the organization,) to integrate fully. Once the first behavior change is normalized, the second is introduced and becomes the entire organization’s focus. In this way, smaller organizations can see significant change within a year and larger organizations within two years.

Companies can, and should, plan to bring organizational coaching in-house to the extent they can. Successful leadership cultures are always improving and focusing on the next “nudge” to improve behavioral performance. These objectives can be identified and managed in-house. If the organization is large enough to support a permanent coaching and facilitation staff, that, too can be staffed internally. We work with our clients to build an ongoing system of organizational coaching and improvement which can be sustained by internal teams with or without external supplemental coaching. We are available on a consulting and coaching basis to continue to support their efforts.

Organizational coaching is always “felt” by the leaders first. If there are specific metrics (e.g., employee turnover, employee satisfaction, sales productivity, time-to-market, etc.) that the company hopes to improve, it’s important to establish the baseline measurements prior to the beginning of the engagement and make it clear how these metrics will factor into evaluating the engagement over what period of time. This establishes the parameters of the proposed intervention strategy. Setting the baseline can be done with surveys to supplement metrics already tracked.