Building Blocks
As a growing number of organizations realize the value in adding coaching to their talent management and leadership development strategies, the role of many professional coach practitioners—both internal and external—has shifted. While past conversations with human resources (HR) and learning and development (L&D) professionals focused on why professional coaching would be beneficial, today coaching practitioners are tasked with articulating how to design initiatives that will foster emerging coaching cultures.
This process has raised critical questions: What does a successful coaching culture look like? What’s more, how can coaches and organizational decision-makers collaborate to design a coaching culture that is impactful, sustainable and aligned with strategic goals?
These questions prompted ICF to create Building a Coaching Culture, a new piece of signature research conducted in partnership with the Human Capital Institute (HCI).
Rather than focusing on whether organizations should use coaching, this study examined the specific ways in which today’s companies and leaders establish and support strong coaching cultures.
By leveraging our HCI partnership, we were able to gather extensive survey feedback from more than 500 individuals currently working within the HR and L&D functions of their organizations. The research also included an extensive review of existing literature on organizational coaching cultures and a series of in-depth interviews with subject-matter experts.
While it is not uncommon to hear anecdotal references to organizations with “strong coaching cultures,” a primary goal of this research was to identify up to six distinguishing criteria for classifying strong coaching cultures.
To determine the components of a successful coaching culture, ICF and HCI created a composite index highlighting the critical success factors necessary to develop an environment of effective coaching.
An organization was classified as having a strong coaching culture by earning a score of five or six on this composite index. Points were generated for each of the following:
- Strongly agree/agree that their organization has a strong coaching culture.
- Strongly agree/agree that employees value coaching.
- Strongly agree/agree that senior executives value coaching.
- Coaching is a fixture in the organization with a dedicated line item in the budget.
- Managers/leaders and/or internal coach practitioners spend above-average time on weekly coaching activities. (“Above-average” was defined as greater than 19 percent for managers/leaders and greater than 17 percent for internal coach practitioners.)
- Managers/leaders and/or internal coach practitioners received accredited coach training.
Although many organizations realize the value of coaching, only 13 percent of the organizations included in Building a Coaching Culture were classified as having a strong coaching culture. These organizations reported significantly more “highly engaged” employees (65 percent) when compared to all other organizations (52 percent). Furthermore, when compared to all other organizations (41 percent), those companies with strong coaching cultures were significantly more likely (60 percent) to report above-average 2013 revenue relative to their industry sector.
Building a Coaching Culture is designed as a resource for organizations and coach practitioners that want to achieve these outstanding results, with insights into designing a strong coaching culture, finding coach practitioners, training coach practitioners and managers/leaders using coaching skills, and executing and evaluating coaching programs.
To obtain the final report for Building a Coaching Culture and learn more about this first-of-its-kind research study, visit Coachfederation.org/coachingculture.
Mark Ruth
Mark Ruth is ICF’s Director of Research and Education. He has been an ICF Global staff member for more than 10 years. His team maintains oversight of ICF Member research and the development of all global industry studies commissioned by the ICF.
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Additionally, for the purpose of full disclosure and as a disclaimer of liability, this content was possibly generated using the assistance of an AI program. Its contents, either in whole or in part, have been reviewed and revised by a human. Nevertheless, the reader/user is responsible for verifying the information presented and should not rely upon this article or post as providing any specific professional advice or counsel. Its contents are provided “as is,” and ICF makes no representations or warranties as to its accuracy or completeness and to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law specifically disclaims any and all liability for any damages or injuries resulting from use of or reliance thereupon.
