Coaching clearly has reached high popularity status over the last 10 years as evidenced by the burgeoning number of coaches in Australia and indeed the growing number of organisations (for example the International Coaching Federation) that have sprung up and continued to grow.  

There has also been other significant advancements in coaching, such as the working party that put together the guidelines on coaching in organisations which were published some 2 years ago.

Coaching clearly has reached high popularity status over the last 10 years as evidenced by the burgeoning number of coaches in Australia and indeed the growing number of organisations (for example the International Coaching Federation) that have sprung up and continued to grow.  

There has also been other significant advancements in coaching, such as the working party that put together the guidelines on coaching in organisations which were published some 2 years ago.

These guidelines highlight what effective coaching in organisations means.  The original guidelines highlighted the role that coaching could play in organisations and how it is effectively applied rather than randomly applied.  Most recently this group got back together and has found that the future of coaching essentially is that it will become a leadership capability and that there is a growing demand for building coaching cultures within organisations, including coaching for teams and groups with common purposes.

In other words coaching will evolve.  It is now commonly understood and accepted to be an effective mechanism at changing behaviour.

High performance organisations will coach.  They will use a number of coaches.

They will use external experts for specific requirements.  They will use internal coaches for specific needs, and ultimately they’ll develop their managers and their leaders to be able to coach staff for one very good reason.

That reason purely and simply is that coaching is the simple most effective way to develop your 2 primary high performance measures within an organisation.  These measures are:

1. How engaged and motivated your staff are.

2. Coaching is the most effective method to build broad capability (as distinct from technical skills).

3. Between 26-31% (depending on the industry) of employees are looking for their next role or promotion right now.  

4. Managers are not equipped to undertake coaching, with the research indicating that a low percentage of managers have the existing skill set to undertake coaching and that most of the training available merely teaches them coaching dialogue, not how to undertake evidenced based coaching for capability development.

So if coaching is indeed the holy grail of employee engagement, capability development and ultimately performance the problem is how do we do it affordably and how do we get the people staff most want it from to be able to do it.

Coaching is the greatest untapped methodology currently in organisations.  Organisations know a lot about their employees, but not what they’re capable and not what potential they have.

To further complicate this, employees want this feedback from their managers and leaders, not from some external expert.  

What’s the answer?  Well, the answer is fairly simple and it goes something like this:

We need experts to help our leaders, because leadership is a specialised construct.  We need experts who understand what leadership is and who can coach leaders to be effective.

We need to have team and group coaching, particularly on common themes such as managing performance and influencing.

And ultimately we need managers who can coach.  It’s the biggest single determinate in how engaged your employees will be and how motivated they will be.  And all of this leads to greater “discretionary effort”, and therefore the sustainable performance of your organisation.

Call OPIC about our leadership coaching, our group coaching for managers and our coach@work system which will turn your managers into effective coaches.