Cultivating a coaching culture will not be right for every organisation. It requires practitioners to have some control over how they go about their work and assumes service-users have the agency and resources required to make responsible decisions. It also recognises that it’s about knowing when coaching is not appropriate, for example, a major crisis which requires direction and action.
In a coaching-culture, the managers role becomes creating an empowering environment and context. The coach-leader is curious, has good rapport, asks questions, and engages people. A coaching culture asks how those being coached will live their shared values.
So, our first challenge is to become organisational anthropologists and explore the culture of our own organisation and how it might look different if that culture was cultivated to become a new coaching culture.