Coaching At Work: The Benefits Of Coaching For The Organization: Part One

Every organization is concerned with performance. Where the commercial enterprise will concentrate on the bottom line and creating value for its shareholders, the public organization will need to provide value for the communities it serves; who fund it in one way or another via taxation. Even the 'not for profit' organization will want to perform, because it is a 'not for loss' organization too.

Coaching improves performance at the organization level, because organizations are collections of people and if they perform better as individuals and teams so does the organization as a whole. The bottom line will increase largely as a result of improvement in the top line - turnover and productivity - rather than swinging cost-cutting exercises.

Organizations that see coaching as a key leadership skill produce more, but without any loss of quality. Staff who are coached feel more valued and tend to care more about the quality of output they produce. Formal quality methodologies such as those provided by the International organization for Standardization (ISO) or Investors in People (IiP) are welcomed by employees and not seen with the cynicism that is otherwise often the case. Staff who are coached feel genuinely appreciated and respond in kind.

Many staff will have responsibility for resources; finance, time, equipment, staff of their own and so on. It follows that the organization will want to see these resources put to good use. Coaching has an emphasis on making people responsible and empowered and organizations that are benefiting from coaching know they can trust their staff to use resources wisely. Take for example an account manager with an allocated budget for client entertainment. Is there any reason to expect that they will be any less careful with the amount they spend than the executive in charge of the function? Coached properly, they'll exercise as much discretion as the next person. Strangled by expenses claim forms and signing off procedures they'll likely find ways of hiding expenses as a way of 'getting their own back'.

I remember doing some follow up work in an organization whose managers we'd trained as coaches and being told 'you know, coaching makes people think as if this place was their own business'. What a wonderful outcome! One thing that follows this change in thinking is a definite improvement in customer service as employees begin to realize that the customer really is the most vital cog in the whole machine. Once organizations have been established with investor's money, customers become the only real source of revenue and profit. Every other business activity is simply a different way of spending customer's money. Customer facing staff can only treat customers as well as they feel treated themselves. Thus if we treat staff better through coaching they will in turn take more care of the customers.

A coaching organization will see relationships improve throughout the organization as people get together and have coaching conversations. Of course there have been conversations at work of one kind or another as long as we've had organizations, but a coaching conversation is different. It is first and foremost a meeting of equals where the tacit agreement is that anything can be raised and discussed honestly and openly. It is a conversation that looks forward to what needs to happen next rather than one which ponders what has happened. It is one where every last drop of learning is sought but that also stresses taking action. In the end, coaching is about doing not talking, but talking means we do the right things.