Developing a Coaching Culture: What It Takes, and Why It’s Needed Built upon humility and valuing others, it is a subset of servant leadership.
By / Ken Vaughan
Too often, leaders think that they are responsible for making most, if not every, decision in their organizations. Perhaps their ability to make good decisions has played a large part in advancing to a position of leadership, so they continue on that track. Perhaps they enjoy the power or control that they feel in making every decision. Or maybe they just don’t trust the people around them to make good decisions. Often, making decisions at the top seems the most expedient thing to do. Whatever the reason, “the buck stops here (and only here)” is the way that many leaders operate. When describing a leader’s role in his 1974 book Management, Peter Drucker listed five specific leadership roles, as follows: 1. Setting objectives 2. Organizing the group 3. Motivating and communicating 4. Measuring performance 5. Developing people Our task here is not to examine each of these roles, but rather to notice that making every decision is not among the five.
One responsibility that is part of the five, however, is developing people. The way leaders develop people shapes the quality of the decisions their people make. In the book Built to Last, Jim Collins describes successful companies as having talent “stacked like cordwood.” One of the best ways of developing people and building that talent pool is by incorporating coaching into leadership—in other words, build a coaching culture within the organization. Culture within an organization can be thought of as the ways we work together and treat people both within and beyond the organization. According to Richard Daft in The Leadership Experience, culture can be defined as the set of key values, assumptions, understandings, and norms that are shared by members of an organization and taught to new members as correct. Culture is not a statement but a practice throughout the organization. And culture flows downhill. Especially in small- to mid-size enterprises, the behaviour of the leader(s) of the organization becomes the culture of the organization. A coaching culture, then, is a set of behaviours in which the skills and practices of coaching become a primary means of interacting. These skills and practices include: demonstrating www.sheetmetaljournal.com • Fall 2021
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