Coaching helps you identify strengths and weaknesses, set goals, and develop strategies to reach those goals. Introducing coaching to your teams can offer numerous benefits for both employees and the organization as a whole.
Caroline Arora — June 1, 2023
In the past, coaching was often seen as a remedial measure used to address performance issues or correct problematic behaviors. However, today’s coaching is much more proactive and focused on developing employees’ skills and abilities to help them reach their full potential.
Coaching is a process where an experienced, knowledgeable, and certified coach provides guidance, support, and encouragement to a coachee or group of coachees to help them achieve personal or professional goals. The purpose of coaching is to facilitate growth, development, and improvement in the coachee’s skills, performance, or mindset.
Introducing coaching to your teams can offer numerous benefits for both employees and the organization as a whole. Let’s break down those seven benefits:
Coaching helps team members identify their strengths and weaknesses, set goals, and develop strategies to reach those goals. This leads to improved individual and team performance. We all know that a company is the sum of its components and in many cases, it’s the human skill sets and expertise. Coaching can help drive individual performance which ultimately drives talent density in an organization and business outcomes.
At Blinkist, we love the Blink “No Rule, Rules”. This outlines the concept of Talent Density and helps you to understand how to build talent density for business performance.
As individual performance improves, this will compound and drive organizational performance as well. As we already read, having employees who perform to a higher standard drives talent density and compounds to a higher organizational level of output. Coupling this with higher engagement levels, increased retention, and commitment is a winning formula!
The International Coaching Federation found that over 70% of professionals who receive coaching benefit from improved work performance, relationships, and more effective communication skills. Furthermore, 86% of companies who introduced coaching report they recouped their investment and more. For those working to convince leadership, the ROI speaks for itself here.
Coaching can also be used to help employees develop their career goals and create a plan for professional development that actually has a lasting impact. By working with a coach, employees can identify the skills and experiences they need to advance in their careers and create a plan to achieve their goals. With coaching, the development can be ongoing, flexible, and grows with the individual or team. This format of development can lead to increased productivity, inspiration, and improved career progression.
In addition, the infamous 70:20:10 learning model teaches that 70% of learning should be ‘on-the-job,’ which becomes the main focus of organizations. Coaching, however, can apply to all three areas of learning. While usually undertaken in a series of sessions on-the-job, coaching offers not just real-life learning experiences, but also fosters social interaction and enhances the application of formal training.
Coaching guides individuals through practical challenges and helps them to draw insights from their own actions. It fosters social interaction by providing a supportive partnership between the coach and coachee or cohort, which facilitates knowledge sharing and learning from experiences. Additionally, coaching enhances the application of formal training by assisting individuals in translating theoretical knowledge into actionable skills and behaviors within their specific work context.
Through coaching, individuals can learn from their experiences, benefit from the guidance of a coach, and bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Coaching plays a pivotal role in fostering a culture of continuous learning and development within organizations, promoting self-reflection, goal-setting, and providing ongoing support and guidance to individuals. By prioritizing coaching, organizations can enhance employee engagement, resulting in increased job satisfaction, motivation, and ultimately driving business performance. Research by Gallup highlights that effective coaching from managers or team leaders accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement, making it a vital component in fostering employee engagement and achieving organizational success.
To increase employee engagement, leaders should adopt a coaching mindset, valuing the development and growth of their team members. They can actively support and encourage coaching initiatives within the organization, emphasizing its importance in driving individual and team performance to reframe existing mindsets around work and growth in a professional landscape.
Original image source: Gallup
Building on the importance of coaching to employee engagement, we have clear insights that employees who feel supported and valued are less likely to leave an organization. When you invest in employees through talent development programs and options like coaching, an organization is demonstrating its investment in the employee. Oftentimes, that investment becomes mutual. This leads to reduced turnover, lower recruitment costs, and increased stability.
Significant research has been undertaken to understand the impact of employee engagement on retention, including this insightful Blink by Patrick Lecioni, “The Truth About Employee Engagement.” Lecioni states that:
“[a] benefit is that engaged employees will stay loyal to their company. They will even recommend it to other good employees. In the long term, this will save the company time and money on training and recruitment.”
Coaching increases agility by guiding individuals to develop adaptive thinking skills, fostering resilience in the face of change, and cultivating a growth mindset that embraces learning and continuous improvement. This is crucial in today’s rapidly changing business environment and a growth mindset is increasingly recognized as an accelerator for performance.
Through the support and guidance of a coach, individuals can enhance their ability to adapt, innovate, and respond effectively to dynamic and evolving circumstances.
A growth mindset is the belief that challenges and setbacks can be opportunities for growth and learning. This mindset helps individuals view setbacks as temporary and develop a sense of resilience in the face of adversity. For further insights, Mindset by Carol Dweck is a great resource.
Finally, coaching plays a pivotal role in helping individuals align their goals with the larger goals of the company, creating a powerful synergy between personal aspirations and organizational objectives that brings long term benefits to all parties involved.
By bringing clarity to the strategic direction of the company and facilitating a deep understanding of individual contributions, coaching empowers coachee to proactively align their efforts towards the collective mission. Through ongoing guidance and unwavering support from an expert coach, individuals can unlock their full potential, embrace a sense of purpose, and cultivate a profound level of engagement that fuels their commitment to driving the company’s success.
Caroline Arora is the SVP of Coaching by Blinkist and the former VP of People and Culture. She is based out of Barcelona, loves to travel with her family, and is a big advocate and fan of remote working.
Blinkist offers numerous learning and growth opportunities for professionals, including cohort coaching.
Get in touch