How coaching can change your culture – not just your people!

Culture change is one of the biggest challenges organisations face – and often, one of the hardest to get right.

Whether it's embedding new values, improving accountability, increasing agility, or improving employee engagement, change often stalls when old habits and behaviours remain deeply rooted. That’s where workplace coaching can become a game-changer.

And it’s not just a nice-to-have anymore. The CIPD –

(2021 update) report advocates for coaching to be used to gather and analyse evidence about culture, allowing HR professionals to make more informed decisions about organisational development and culture change. 

What is workplace coaching?

Workplace coaching is a process in which a professional coach works with an employee or team to identify and develop certain skills and improve their professional development.

A lot of workplace coaching is often outsourced to remove bias and encourage open conversation. However, when it comes to coaching to inform culture change, there's often a lot of value found in bringing the coaching into the workplace by training a network of coaches.

What value does coaching offer the workplace?

In addition to the many benefits that coaching offers individual employees, it has the ability to benefit workplace culture, too. Here are just a few examples...

• Personal development - By training up a cohort of internal coaches, they'll gain leadership coaching skills, helping them become a symbol of empowerment within their teams.

• Enhanced insight - Your employee survey may assess the symptoms of the organisation, but workplace coaching will identify the deeper-rooted issues that may need longer-term treatment. Through the supervision of the coaches, the sessions will help the business identify and collate shared culture themes. These can then be discussed and acted on by the executive.

• Increased empowerment - this process sends a signal to the workplace that the executive is taking development and 'change for good' seriously. This promotes truthful conversations within coaching and increased employee engagement, as both coaches and coachees know that they can act as a force for change in their organisation.

• Breakdown silos - coaches are encouraged to work across different business areas for confidentiality purposes, improving collaboration across the company.

Coaching to evoke culture change

By taking a systemic approach to coaching, you create feedback loops between coaching conversations and your leadership team, helping to surface cultural blockers early and inform strategic decisions.

In addition, you can use the coaching network to address particular cultural issues you may be facing, such as a loss of customers, a lack of accountability, or to understand the causes of disparities.

By embedding coaching as part of your culture change journey, you're creating a space for reflection, challenge, and behavioural accountability – all of which are essential for lasting change.

Case Study: Coaching for Culture at the House of Commons

We helped the House of Commons build an in-house coaching faculty to support internal development and performance. But what emerged was more than that – their coaching programme became a platform for cultural insight and transformation.

Through supervision and structured coaching conversations, internal coaches were able to surface themes that mattered, including issues related to leadership behaviours and internal communications. De-personalised insights were shared back with senior leaders, creating a vital feedback loop.

The loop helped leadership take targeted, strategic action, creating a more responsive and people-centred workplace.

Interested in driving culture change through coaching?

Culture change doesn’t happen through policies alone – it happens through people. And coaching is one of the most effective ways to help those people reflect, grow, and align with something new.

If you're looking to shift your culture and want to explore how coaching could support that journey, get in touch with us. We'd love to help