The structure of a coaching culture

It is time to get started, now that Ali and the rest of the departmental heads have accepted their appointments in the coaching culture executive committee. Charles, the chief executive officer, chairs the first meeting. He gives thanks to all present for their long-term commitment and sacrifices to be part of this strategic organisation charged with rejuvenating all its leaders and people to acquire new age leadership skills and behaviour. 

Charles gives his commitment to lead from the front as the sponsor of this coaching initiative and the head of the executive committee. It is apt for the leader to be the captain charting the course to ensure the coaching culture initiatives meet the business needs in accordance with the budget that is being set for the desired results. 

The executive committee where everyone belongs is a collective body that makes major decisions to ensure that this initiative is well integrated with the other initiatives and to be a full body working towards achieving goals in the most cost-effective manner. 

Everybody agrees that James, the human resources director, is the manager in charge of this initiative. He will develop all the three plans on project, evaluation and deployment. Essentially, he is the chief coordinator who makes the day-to-day decisions regarding the initiative, facilitates the executive committee meetings and manages the communication activities to the people in the organisation.

One other component in the total structure that they do not want to miss out is getting Robert from finance to head the watchdog section. He will be responsible for setting the coaching objectives and determine the evaluation criteria for the success of the coaching culture initiative. It is also the body that will conduct interim evaluations and recommend how to improve the execution for greater effectiveness. 

With the coaching culture structure being set up and its responsibilities agreed to and communicated, the last component to complete the total executive committee involves engaging the most suitable coaching company. The HR director is tasked with pooling a few good companies for the committee to choose from.

Once recruited, the chief coach of the selected coaching company will also be a member of the committee. He will educate the people in the organisation on the power of coaching to get their buy in and support, as well as sharing the best practices of similar initiatives that they know of so that the client organisation will have plenty of good ideas on what they should do for the best results to be achieved. 

This completes the set up of a fully-fledged executive committee to drive the coaching culture initiative. With full representations from a cross section of the organisation, this means that the entire management team is behind it, led by the CEO. 

This tells everyone how single-minded and united its leaders are in this. It becomes easier to move things, as every member of the team will deal directly with his or her own people during the implementation stage. All these augur well for a good kick-off to get this initiative not only off the ground but working effectively throughout the coaching journey.  

With the executive committee in force, the full tasks begin to take shape now. 

So in part four of this series, we will discuss how the team defines the coaching context upon which the plan and its activities will be formulated in order to drive the coaching culture initiative.