What is the level of leadership coaching maturity at your organisation?
After learning support often tends to fall to the manager.
However, our 2017 Learning Transfer Research: Insights for Impact found that only 22% of managers are facilitating conversations both before and after learning interventions. Many in L&D are used to getting push back from line managers saying that it’s “not their job” to focus on learning outcomes and this should be the job of the L&D department.
Training Industry believe we are entering an era of the “workplace coach”. They detail the multiple benefits that the workplace coach can bring for learners and organisations. They believe this will help talent retention, cost effectiveness, and provide just in time support.
With a common lack of manager support, it would seem Training Industry are correct and we should be moving towards a culture where workplace coaches, people who are trained with specific coaching skills are the norm. Whether it’s managers, an internal workplace coach, or external specialists – someone needs to deliver the coaching role to truly benefit learning and improve organisational results.
- Our research saw 25% of contributors respond that their “leaders practise and demonstrate coaching at every level”.
- Of these 25%, 39% suggested that their organisation’s investment in learning was EXTREMELY beneficial, compared to only 16% of those from organisations where coaching is not practised and demonstrated at every level.
- So twice as many learning leaders are finding their organisation’s investment in learning is far superior when leaders practice and demonstrate coaching at every level.
- Nearly a quarter (23%) of these individuals at organisations where coaching is demonstrated also assessed that their organisation’s efforts to support learners in sustaining their after-training behaviour change was highly effective, compared to only 5% from individuals at organisations where coaching is not employed.
Although we found that there are various levels of coaching in organisations currently, on the whole this modality is highly under-utilised.
As we’ve said above, managers are not necessarily the most appropriate person to help a learner apply their new skills or knowledge. Understanding your organisation’s level of learning / coaching maturity will help gauge if they are best placed to fulfil that role or not.
I’d like to see organisations considering how we can make coaching available to all levels of managers and leaders in an organisation and to really think about what the role is of a workplace coach? How are their activities being measured? What supervision do they have?
We encourage L&D professionals to choose their approach to solving the workplace coach and learning transfer dilemma in the context of the maturity of their leadership capabilities. With coaching as a core leadership capability perhaps we can now simplify this question to help you assess your organisation’s readiness for learning transfer by considering ‘What is the level of the managers coaching ability?’
When giving managers the skills it takes more than offering a model. While most robust coaching models are simple in format, it is not easy to execute well, and without real skill development will be successful in 20-30% of cases. In other scenarios it typically becomes a tick box exercise or worse, damages the working relationship.
It is my absolute passion and mission to make learning transfer more accessible for the world and everyone in it. At Lever we have a number of different solutions available depending on the level of learning and development or coaching maturity at your organisations and strategic importance of your learning initiatives.