Location, Location, Location.  This oft used catch cry is meant to reflect that ultimately when making one of the most important purchases of your life (your home) that location is the primary consideration.  The catch cry is meant to remind us that at the end of the day without this key imperative you can easily lapse into a substandard purchase which becomes less than you hoped it was worth.

In an organisational context the similar catch cry should be Performance, Performance, Performance

Location, Location, Location.  This oft used catch cry is meant to reflect that ultimately when making one of the most important purchases of your life (your home) that location is the primary consideration.  The catch cry is meant to remind us that at the end of the day without this key imperative you can easily lapse into a substandard purchase which becomes less than you hoped it was worth.

In an organisational context the similar catch cry should be Performance, Performance, Performance.

But is everything we do really about performance?  Is it really about understanding how high performance is achieved and maintained and how high performance teams, departments and organisations are nurtured and enabled?

In reality there is not necessarily an alignment between corporate imperatives and how results are necessarily achieved.  This may sound like a contradiction, but let’s explore it a little further.

A common organisational tool for growth is acquisition.  A number of the organisations I’ve worked with have quite rightly acquired organisations to help them grow their business and provide shareholder value.  These purchases however often create as many challenges for an organisation as they do opportunities.  Most immediate focus tends to be on the cost cutting and “alignment savings” that can be made by the acquisition of an organisation.

This is absolutely imperative and a critical part of the calculation which organisations undertake to determine the viability of the purchase.  But these cost cuttings time and again have not necessarily lead to successful acquisitions or successful business performance.  This happens consistently over and over, and yet organisations seem to fall for the same mistake time and time again.  

But what is it that happens?  It seems to me that what happens in organisations confuse two broad concepts.  The first concept is business results, and there are a number of levers which can be pulled and addressed to ensure results are achieved.  Here I am defining results as a direct outcome.  Essentially results are your business’ profit and loss outcomes.  These can be measured in tangible measures such as sales and profit.

Performance however is an entirely different beast.  Performance and results are assumed to be connected and in a very small and compartmentalised way they can be shown to be aligned.

Longer term performance and therefore sustainable results however are an entirely different thing.  They are about creating skills, capabilities and cultures within an organisation that allow people to be the best they can be.  This involves identifying people’s capability and how they are aligned to the key organisational needs, understanding the longer term business growth and determinations within an organisation, and ultimately investing in sustainable performance which leads to results.  This is the great irony and conundrum.  Short term results can be achieved without focusing on performance.  They can be achieved by a number of mechanisms.  Some of these include:

1. Cost Cutting

2. Price Increases

3. Changing Payment Structures…. and so on

Again there is no doubt that these are all viable business practices which organisations who are committed to shareholder value in the short term must take on board.

This however bears little resemblance to how sustainable longer term performance can and must be achieved within an organisation.  

Individual and collective performance is a function of a number of things, but increasingly some of the following behaviours by managers are crucial to this outcome.

These include:

1. Coaching for performance

2. Managing performance and holding people to account (accountability)

3. Stakeholder management and influencing (business alignment)

4. A strategic purpose beyond purely making money.  Again this is particularly important as part motivated more by purpose than purely results or in this case rewards.

The question for an organisation is how do we balance between the achievement of results and the need to create a performance culture that leads to sustainable business performance?

This article will specifically focus on the contribution of coaching to performance and more broadly the coaching industry and what industries are looking to achieve to use this demonstrably effective tool to assist their organisation in achieving performance.

Australian Standards

Recently a collaborative effort which included a number of professional bodies, professional coaches and various organisations undertook a process to review coaching in organisations.

The outcome of this was the release in 2011 of Standards Australia Coaching & Organisations Guidelines.  These guidelines outlined the process for embedding coaching within an organisation and addresses many of the considerations involved in effective coaching.

Recently this stakeholder group got together again to examine coaching and the role it would play longer term in organisations.  

Among the review of the guidelines was a recognition that coaching is evolving and that these needs need to be addressed.  

Essentially the group identified a number of key changes to coaching and how coaching will look in the future.  This has obvious implications to an organisation’s commitment to performance more broadly.

Some of these changes included:

1. A general recognition that there’s a need to use internal coaches more broadly to spread the benefit of coaching within an organisation.

2. That there’s a recognition that the ability to coach is now becoming a leadership capability, and therefore effective leaders and indeed managers need to be able to coach to maximise their own effectiveness.

3. And there’s growing demand for both:

   1. Team and group coaching.

   2. Building coaching cultures.

In essence what this tells us is that the future of coaching is to build coaching capability within organisations and to complement this with the use of specialised external coaches.

But what constitutes a complete manager as coach program?  Overwhelmingly most manager as coach programs are looking at developing management skills as coaches.  Not enough emphasis has been put on the fact that the capabilities which define an effective coach are distinctly different from the capabilities that define an effective manager.  This distinction is crucial to make.

So moving forward will developing manager as coach programs effectively meet this local trend of the need for a greater amount of coaching, as it is clearly one of the key contributing determinants to effective performance?

Well, the question that must be asked before this is who are you coaching and why?  Seems like a simple enough question, but perhaps one that is not broadly enough asked.  

Secondly one needs to ask what is one expecting out of coaching and what does one think coaching will bring to their organisation?  

The answer simply has to be that coaching is an intervention that allows people to build skills and capabilities that lead to performance.  

To achieve this the coaching process needs not to be about the manager as coach developing coaching skills, but rather a fully integrated system that brings coaching culture to an organisation.  It’s important here to emphasise that this model sees coaching as building capability, not as a friendly dialogue to make people feel better.

Fundamentally therefore coaching has to be about behaviour change and that behaviour change has to be abound performance.  

Such a system therefore needs to take a (strangely enough) systemic view of what coaching can contribute to an organisation.

This view therefore needs to include an understanding of the following questions:

1. What are the key capabilities that predict job performance?

2. Does the coachee have the capabilities to do the role in question?

3. What is the current performance of the coachee (or staff member) within the role?

4. What are the strategic imperatives of the organisation and what are we trying to achieve?

5. What development interventions will build capability gaps that lead to performance?

6. What support does a frontline manager, who mostly has strengths in terms of planning and execution rather than coaching, need to be able to be an effective coach?  

7. What ongoing tools does a manager need to turn a coaching session into something that builds capability and performance rather than something that creates comfort in the relationship with the staff member?

All of these are very valid and hugely important questions.

These are the questions that OPIC has pondered and examined for the last five years, and ultimately has sought to answer.  

The answer lies in a fully integrated system which addresses many of these issues.  

OPIC coach@work is a one stop shop solution for building a coaching culture.  By culture OPIC means developing those capabilities that lead to performance.