Coaching Consciousness

Many people will have their own definition of what a coaching culture is. Here’s one of mine: Coaching culture is a culture in which leaders are initiating bolder conversations for better organisations. 

Let’s stay with the coaching space for a moment. One of the key tasks of coaches is to open up better and bolder conversations with their clients. That is the essence of what great coaches do. As much as their coaching skills help them do that, it is really their level of consciousness that shapes their coaching presence and makes a difference. 

Drawing a parallel between the task of a coach and the one of leader, we can say that opening up better and bolder conversations is exactly what the great leaders do within their organisations when they wish to support their people and the entire system reaching their potential. Drawing the parallel between what a coach and a leader do, we also need to draw a parallel between the levels of consciousness they operate from. 

We’ve all experienced how the corporate conversations that matter are often times uncomfortable as much as they are needed. They are designing everyone’s life in the workplace. What’s being talked about and even more so what’s not being talked about is costing your organisation success and the employees the culture that inspires best in them. 

So, to be able to hold better and bolder conversations in the workplace, leaders - in the first place - need to operate from a level that could enable them to show up with a coaching presence. They must develop - what I like to call - a coaching consciousness.  

Leaders who operate from a coaching consciousness will develop a culture in which these seven statements are actually true:

1.     Great leaders activate leadership in everyone: themselves and others

2.     Great leaders are great coaches who support people’s passions

3.     Your workplace conversations are designing your culture right now

4.     What’s not being talked about is costing your organisation success and your employees the culture they desire 

5.     Great leaders are initiators of better and bolder conversations 

6.     Great leaders bring their integrity to work to create safety in the workplace so that those conversations could actually happen 

7.     Great leaders’ legacy is creative thinking and meaningful talking kept alive in their organisation long after they’re gone

These are seven beliefs that live in a culture created by those leaders who operate from a coaching consciousness. And so, the discussion about making a coaching culture real in organisations, actually becomes the discussion about teaching coaching consciousness to the leaders - helping them to develop first the mindset (and then the language) for bolder conversations so that they can help create what everyone collectively wants – better cultures and better organisations made real. 

Without evolving leaders’ coaching consciousness, skills won’t do much in terms of lasting change and transformation. And rather than being real, coaching in such a culture is not likely to be more than a human resource buzzword.