Making The Case For Internal Coaching
Why should your organisation build and invest in an internal coaching capability?
Think about the challenges your company is going to face over the next few years.
- What is it going to take to reach your goals?
- How are you going to deliver higher levels of quality and performance?
- What values will differentiate you from the competition?
Whatever your strategy, the answer has to start with the quality of your leadership.
Your business leaders need to drive and manage change. They need to make things happen, get things moving and inspire others. They may need to change the way business is done or how decisions are made through increased employee engagement.
In short, your leaders are responsible for delivering future business performance.
The role of internal coaching
The aim of internal coaching is to ensure that your business leaders have the capabilities and leadership style required to meet your company’s strategic priorities. While coaching is primarily used to improve personal performance and manage talent, it should be tied to your business aims as well.
When coaching is used to make gains that go beyond an individual’s development, the rationale for internal coaching becomes clear. A business case based on corporate objectives also generates senior management buy-in for your internal coaching which is essential if it is to succeed.
Focus on the business results
Internal coaching works best when there is a compelling purpose in mind, one that is focused on the business results you want to achieve. Identify the most pressing issues faced by your senior managers and tackle these first. These might include talent retention, team morale, improving sales or building new skills to satisfy customer expectations.
Next, target the key people or roles in your organisation where coaching can make the biggest difference. In this way, coaching becomes a practical and measurable way to meet targeted business objectives.
Motivate others
Also consider that successful leaders are not driving performance in isolation but through others in the company. In today’s performance-led culture, effective leadership means motivating employees to go the extra mile or take the right decisions for themselves.
Performance is being delivered through relationships and shared endeavour and this calls for your business leaders to develop new values, such as emotional intelligence, collaboration, innovation and team building.
Furthermore, if you want the culture of a team, division or even an entire business to change, then your leaders need to ‘be the culture they want to see’ and demonstrate the desired behaviours themselves.
Coaching must be valued
In our experience, one barrier can prevent an internal coaching programme from achieving its full business potential. To work effectively, coaching sessions have to be valued – but like the NHS, internal coaching is usually free at the point of delivery.
Our recommendation is that you offer a limited number of coaching sessions to each of your businesses every year. In this way, senior executives are encouraged to regard their allocation of coaching hours as a valuable and finite resource that must be ‘spent’ wisely if it is to drive performance and deliver business results.
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About Cote Consultants
Cote Consultants is a coaching, leadership and performance improvement firm based in central London. We work with any organisation that wants to drive sustainable growth in performance and capital through the personal and professional development of its most promising leaders and teams.
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Posted in: Executive coaching, Internal coaching