Category: coaching

One of the reasons I decided to undertake a coaching qualification was because I wanted to have a better structure and clearer focus on how I support people to grow and develop.

During the course I also began thinking about the wider culture of the organisation and how coaching might contribute to the positive changes we’d already been implementing.

When I first started the ILM Level 7 Executive and Senior Level Coaching and Mentoring Diploma, the coaching hours required for the qualification needed to be completed with people operating at that level. Naturally, that led me to work with members of our leadership team as well as a number of external colleagues.

But something didn’t sit quite right with me.

Whilst I understood the rationale for the qualification requirements, I didn’t want coaching to become something that was only available to people in senior positions in my place of work.

If I genuinely believed in the value of coaching, then surely the opportunity to benefit from it shouldn’t be determined by where someone sits within the organisational structure.

So I put out a note of interest to staff across the organisation to understand whether coaching was something people might find useful and I also wanted to gauge whether being coached by me would be a bit off-putting given my position. Not that I asked that explicitly from the outset but people were informed the coach would be me, as the reality was that outsourcing coaching for everyone was unlikely to be financially possible.

The response was encouraging.

Around half of our staff team expressed an initial interest.

People were looking for opportunities to reflect, develop and think differently about their work. Most people had never experienced coaching before but were importantly intrigued by the suggestion that it would be something they could access.

The challenge then became how to make that happen in a way that felt meaningful, sustainable and aligned with the culture we were already trying to build.

Coaching as part of the bigger picture

One thing I was clear about from the outset was that I didn’t want coaching to become a standalone initiative sitting alongside everything else we were doing, or some secret conversations you had with the CEO that undermined managers.

Over the past few years, we’ve made deliberate changes to how we approach supervision, appraisals and staff development.

We’ve worked hard to make conversations more reflective and developmental, moving away from purely performance-focused discussions towards approaches that encouraged learning, growth and self-awareness.

Creating a coaching offer that operated completely separately from those developments and supportive line management relationships felt like a missed opportunity. 

Instead, I wanted coaching to complement and strengthen the wider culture we were trying to create.

Designing a three-way coaching model

After discussions with my own coaching supervisor, alongside a fair amount of reading and research, I became interested in three-way coaching models.

The model we’ve developed is relatively simple.

People who are interested in coaching initially meet with me for an informal conversation about what coaching is, what it isn’t, and what participation would involve.

This has been particularly important given my role as CEO.

It’s allowed us to have open conversations about boundaries, confidentiality and expectations before anyone decides whether coaching feels right for them.

Following that conversation, people discuss their interest with their line manager and, if everyone agrees that coaching would be beneficial, we move into a three-way coaching agreement meeting.

That conversation involves the person being coached, their line manager and me.

Together, we explore what the individual hopes to achieve through coaching, any development areas they would like to focus on and how this connects to their wider role and aspirations.

The emphasis throughout is on development rather than performance.

The coaching goals belong to the individual and are aligned with what has been discussed previously through supervision and appraisal.

The line manager’s role is to contribute context, support the process and understand what success might look like.

Following this, the coaching itself takes place through a series of one-to-one monthly sessions.

These conversations remain confidential.

Nothing from those sessions is fed back to the manager unless the coachee chooses to share it themselves.

At the end of the process, we will come back together for a final three-way conversation to reflect on progress, learning and what support may be helpful going forward.

Early stages

We’re still in the very early stages of this new venture, but there are already things that I’m really enjoying seeing.

One is the enthusiasm people have shown for investing time in their own development.

Another is how powerful it can be simply to create dedicated space for reflection.

In busy organisations, it’s easy for development to become something we talk about rather than something we actively create time for.

Coaching creates that space.

It gives people permission to pause, think differently and explore challenges that they may otherwise continue carrying around without ever fully exploring.

It’s been really nice to hear staff talking about noticing positive changes in the way people are working following others taking part in coaching and that being filtered through the organisation.

Colleagues have commented on seeing differences in how people approach situations, how they lead and how they engage or communicate with others.

It’s encouraging because that was the vision I had in mind at the beginning with the goal to support people’s growth.

Culture experienced in practice

In last week’s blog, I wrote that culture isn’t what you say… it’s what people experience.

I still believe that it’s created through the everyday experiences people have when they come to work.

It’s shaped by whether people feel listened to, trusted, invested in and supported to develop.

For me, introducing coaching isn’t really only about coaching.

It’s about creating another way of demonstrating that people matter and acknowledging that they are our main strength.

It’s about investing in people’s potential and creating opportunities for growth.

And ultimately, it’s about helping to build the kind of culture where learning, reflection and development are part of everyday practice rather than some kind of once a year event.

So it’s a bit of a test to see if this model will work for us and if so, how we can improve it as we go if it looks like it’s here to stay.

My thinking is that if coaching can help people grow, and if people help shape culture, then investing time in one may ultimately strengthen the other.