A Research Paper By Ioan-Andrei Chirila, Young Professionals Coach, SWITZERLAND
An Internal Coaching Culture
While there is plenty of literature[1][2][3] on how having an internal coaching culture is beneficial for a company, the case for incentivizing people to become internal coaches is not as well documented and depends from company to company. This article tries to cover that gap from the perspective of the author, an internal coach at Google for more than 2 years. I shall note that my opinions are prejudiced by working in the tech sector, where I’m more familiar with the structure, incentives, and ways of work. Opinions expressed are solely my own and don’t express the views or opinions of my employer.
The target audience is people working in medium or large companies, that besides doing their job have also a passion for human understanding and a potentially unfulfilled desire to help others, but without a clear means of doing so. The hope is that by reading this, more individual contributors and managers within corporations would embrace internal coaching and see it as a way of growing themselves, their teams, and their company, and overall contributing to a better world, one coachee at a time.
What is coaching?
ICF’s own website[4] lists the definition as
partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity, and leadership.
There’s no limitation on what or who can do it and there’s no restriction in roles, e.g. individual contributor, manager, or leader. As long as the coachee experiences growth, and feels they are getting closer to their goals while respecting their view of the world, the coaching relationship could be considered a success.
How Is Coaching Within Organizations Different?
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but a couple of aspects which, coming from pure practice, I considered were worth calling out as both advantages and potential areas where being aware of the differences between within and outside an organization makes the coaching process more effective.
Coaching within organizations has a couple of advantages for both the coach and coachee, making communication easier:
- being in the same organization, both partners have a common language and common understanding of the organization’s culture, details regarding various processes, details regarding various ways of handling common situations (e.g. performance management),
- within the same organization, there’s less of a concern of giving by mistake information that’s not supposed to be divulged outside of the company, thus making it easier to establish trust and safety within the coaching relationship.
On the other hand, there are also a couple of aspects that one needs to navigate around:
- there should be no direct reporting line between the coach and the coachee. A manager being a coach for a report, while it could work under some conditions, is not going to be as effective as someone else further in the organization being that report’s coach. The main reason is human nature: as a coach, while providing coaching, there’s an expectation of creating a safe space for the coachee, without judgment, acknowledging and empowering the coachee to come up with their own solution, in their own understanding of their environment. A direct manager would have too much context and would be challenged to be as neutral and open to the coachee’s truth, potentially damaging the working relationship.
- with the shared context between coach and coachee, it’s easy to slip from being a coach to being a mentor. Sometimes this is detrimental to the effects of the coaching session, as telling someone a solution might come with the assumption that the given solution would automatically work, which is seldom the case (a strategy that worked in the company one year ago, for a particular problem, might not work today due to a different environment).
- within the organization there might be clear limits and expectations on coaching results: e.g. up to 3 sessions per employee, and visible (after some measure) performance improvement. This might be sometimes at odds with how coaching outside of the organization works, where the coachee might have as many sessions as needed for a longer period of time, and they’re the sole evaluator of the results. This limitation is also affecting how deep one could go into particular issues, as, while outside of a company, if needed, one might be able to extend a session by 30 minutes, or one hour, depending on the coach and coachee’s schedule flexibility, within an organization, usually with next meetings lined up, this kind of schedule flexibility is seen seldom – so sessions have a hard stop at how much time they were initially scheduled (e.g. 1h).
There are multiple lists[5][6] calling out best practices for building and sustaining a coaching culture within the company, and most of them also detail building internal coaching capacity.
Why Should You Consider Becoming an Internal Coach?
By becoming an internal coach you could help others while also:
- scaling yourself and expose yourself to new and interesting problems,
- building up skills to manage stakeholders for the problems you’re working on,
- developing better tools for understanding and growing your team.
Depending on the company and the incentive structure, becoming an internal coach might also enable you to access internal and specialized training (e.g. via external coaches), as well as internal events (e.g. coach supervision), internal support groups and internal like-minded people that are also exhibiting a growth mindset. Additionally, it might make sense to check with your manager what the job expectations are, e.g. for some companies there are programs (e.g. 20% for Google[7], managers for Microsoft[8]) that allow employees to use company time for coaching activities. Disclaimer: I did take advantage of Google 20% time and coached my colleagues during normal working hours.
Scaling Yourself
If you’re already mentoring colleagues, you might have already noticed the limitations of mentoring: you have only one life, with one set of experiences from which you can draw. For a particular problem, at a particular point in time, the actions that you carried produced a satisfying solution, so when you’re asked by a mentee about how to solve the problem they’re currently facing, you might be able to draw the parallel to the particular problem you solved and provide that insight, which the mentee would have to adapt and apply to their current problem. While this is locally potentially solving an issue and helping a person, there are going to be problems that you haven’t encountered and can’t directly provide guidance on. At this point, coaching comes as an alternative approach because the perspective is not that you’re an expert in the problem shown, but the person in front of you is the expert, and you’re just asking the powerful questions that might unlock a solution. So, from your experience, and relying on the understanding of the person in front of you of the problem, limitations, and environment, you can scale to handle any kind of problem that might surface – thus using coaching as a way of scaling yourself.
Stakeholder Management
Coaching is an extremely good way of sharpening soft skills, which become more and more important as one advances in their career. From a point on, the problems that one starts solving rely less on nitty-gritty technical details, and more on communication skills:
- actively listening to the stakeholders of a problem and understanding their requirements, limitations, and motivations,
- defining measures of success for engagements with partners, and carrying out prioritization exercises as the business conditions evolve,
- cultivating organizational awareness around best practices,
- driving consensus towards a solution in an environment in which stakeholders are all pursuing slightly different agendas.
Team Growth
Coaching sets one up for a better understanding of their team and, for people in leadership positions (e.g. tech lead, manager), is a good enabler for growing the team. As one grows in their role, the expectations for leading, not necessarily from a position of authority, start building (example for senior software engineer[9]).
Within a company it’s relatively easy to aim towards climbing the corporate ladder, always being on the outlook for the next shiny project that might bring one there. But often people realize on the sidelines that some of the requirements for the next level don’t suit them, e.g. due to a very skewed work-life balance, very late or very early meetings, or extremely high delivery pressure, and would rather be able to do their job and feel fulfilled. As an internal coach, you’d have the opportunity to coach colleagues with similar challenges, enable them to choose what’s best for them and grow the skills to identify and communicate with your own teammates clearly on what they’re willing or unwilling to do in order to move a project forward.
Tips for Effective Internal Coaching
As internal coaching is usually a free resource offered to the employee, for you, as an internal coach, it makes sense to have as much of the administrative or clarification work done completely outside of the session. Here are a couple of tips that I found in my internal coaching practice that allowed both me and the coachee to fully focus on the session at hand.
Send out a setup email well before the session, clarifying what coaching is and isn’t, and putting the questions one would usually have in the session agreement: what’s the session going to be about, what makes the topic important, what would make the session successful for the colleague, and how would they know they’re successful. I don’t require an answer and the e-mail clearly states to just set time aside to think about it, no writing is required. This enables us to get on the same page, flag early if the need is for mentoring redirect to the right resources, and seed the initial discussion straight with the topic, saving the time one would usually use to introduce themselves and provide more background and leading to a more focused session.
Set up a clear coaching profile to enable colleagues who are interested in having coaching sessions with you to read about your background, see if at least from an interests point of view you’d fit, and enable them to choose if you’d be the right coach for them or not. This doesn’t mean that, if needed, this can’t be narrated, but usually this makes it possible to fully skip the introduction in the first coaching session, allowing more time for the topic at hand.
Send out a short summary email after the session, calling out the action items the clients committed to doing. While this would not normally be done in a coaching session outside of the organization where initial accountability is bound by the client paying for the session, within the organization this serves a double purpose: support for accountability and a way of asking for direct feedback. I usually ask at the end of the session if the person would like to get a summary email. Sometimes people keep their own notes and are fine without them, sometimes they are so caught up in the topic that they miss taking notes and are really appreciative of receiving a written short summary. This is also a great opportunity to provide answers without taking off the coaching hat. There were cases during the session in which the colleague asked very clear questions about particular topics on which I, as a fellow employee, knew the answer or had links to resources. Instead of providing the answer on the spot, and potentially exiting the coaching flow, I’m asking if it’s fine to follow up with an email with the answer and to focus on what the person was working on at the moment.
Using the tips above enabled me to make sure that there’s a good fit with the coachees, experiencing no single drop out of coaching due to chemistry in more than 2 years of internal coaching practice, have high engagement from the coachee side, due to clear upfront expectations and clarifications and have great feedback that I was able to transform into improved sessions, the last tip, with sending the short summary email, being the fruit of such feedback and allowing me to grow myself as a coach.
Being a coach also helps one build internal resilience and, in face of the changes like the ones currently affecting the world, provides one more tool that one could use to find and establish a balance that’s meaningful for them – within or outside the workplace.
I hope that through the arguments listed above you, as a reader, are better informed about internal coaching and might consider becoming an internal coach within your own organization, contributing to making the workplace and overall the world a better place for us all.
References
[1] ICF/HCI research study
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-google-knows-train-its-managers-coaches-pete-tosh/
[3] Building A Coaching Culture: How Managers As Coaches Can Include And Develop New Employees Successfully, Andreas von der Heydt
[4] https://coachingfederation.org/about, under the What it coaching header.
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2021/07/26/eight-best-practices-for-building-an-internal-coaching-program/
[6] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-internal-coaching-program-5-phase-roadmap-your-malini-shah
[7] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkotter/2013/08/21/googles-best-new-innovation-rules-around-20-time
[8] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/empowering-employees
[9] https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/