Building A Coaching Culture

As discussed earlier in this book, the role of managers has changed significantly in recent years. Managers are increasingly being expected to take on the role of facilitator and coach, helping to create a climate within which individuals and teams perform at their optimum, rather than necessarily being seen as ‘subject experts’ themselves. In many organisations, coaching has become an essential management skill and forms part of the core development for managers.

Through coaching, individuals develop job-specific skills, as well as skills in learning how to learn. In the coaching relationship individuals can learn and refine many of the essential skills required for operating in a knowledge-enabled culture. These include questioning skills, what-if type thinking, problem-solving, creative thinking, as well as assessing and managing risk-taking. The coaching relationship can also provide an opportunity to help individuals develop their ability as reflective practitioners.

Reflection, as a way of learning, is again not a new phenomenon. It is a process that has been used by many eminent philosophers and critical thinkers. Sadly, despite its link with learning, very few organisations use the reflective practitioner model as a way of learning. Some management writers (Daudlin, 2000), think that this is because organisations place a higher value on action rather than reflection; a situation that is reinforced through the adoption of short-term management rewards and incentives. That said it seems that some of the larger organisations in the USA, according to Daudlin, such as Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, are starting to incorporate the reflective practitioner philosophy into their management development programmes.

Daudlin has introduced tools and learning interventions to facilitate learning through reflection among managers within her own organisation, the Polaroid Corporation. One tool, The Reflective Workbook, outlines the different stages in the reflection process: articulation of a problem; analysis of the problem; formulation and testing of a tentative theory to explain the problem and deciding on what action to take to address the problem. The tool also incorporates the use of learning logs, as a way of capturing an individual’s random thoughts about the learning that occurs throughout their day-to-day work.

Individuals can use this tool on their own, with the help of a coach, or as part of a more formal learning process with a community of fellow learners. One of the benefits of learning with a community of learners, as we shall see in the next chapter, can open up the learning terrain, providing the opportunity to learn from other people’s knowledge.

One of my colleagues, David Lines, suggests that as practitioners we can add value by helping people find different ways of reflecting. Often in the reflective process individuals start with questions like What did I do wrong? or Where did I go wrong? A different way of reflecting would be to start asking questions about the situation the person and/or team find themselves in. Where are we? Where did we intend to get to? Where did we actually get to? How do we feel about that? What are the implications?

I was reminded of the importance of reflection in the learning process when I met with the head of a Montessori school in London to talk about the Montessori approach to learning. From this discussion I learnt that the underlying principles behind the Montessori approach include:

• Observation – in the first few days when a new child joins the nursery the teacher simply observes the child’s behaviour to get a sense of what interests them most and what areas they are naturally drawn to, rather than directing the child into a particular activity. From there, the teacher then knows where best to channel his/her energy to help the child’s learning.

• Adopting a holistic approach – of the child itself and also the child within its learning environment.

• Helping children become reflective practitioners – i.e. working out for themselves why one way of doing something brings a different result than another.

• Helping children develop their identity and self-esteem – this is crucial if a child is to engage in learning in the future.

Some questions that comes to mind for me then are: How could we transfer this type of thinking into the workplace? and How can HR help managers develop their ability of helping people to learn?