How a Narrative Coaching approach increased employment engagement, and company culture amongst PwC employees
Background
I was asked to consult with the Human Capital team on how to improve the coaching skills of their Directors and Partners. As I would with any individual coaching client, I began by conducting a series of interviews with key people across the firm about the current state of coaching in the firm. Like most other organizations, they had made significant investments in two leader-as-coach programs. However, they had not made as much impact on the overall culture or coaching capabilities as they had hoped. In large part, this was because these programs were consultant and content intensive, and they required leaders to adopt a lot of specialized terminology and frameworks. While the key buzz words from the programs had made their way into the everyday lexicon, that had not led to enough of the necessary behavior changes.
They were looking for fresh approach that would help them shift the culture as well as the skills levels. They choose a narrative coaching approach in large part because I showed them how it would leverage the best of their initial investments, e.g., why developing new a new mindset was key, how it revolved around one simple model, and how it could be scaled to have a much broader impact. I ended up working with them for three years, in which we embedded the core framework in most every aspect of the HC function as well as in some key areas in how the business was run.
Solution
One of the unique features of narrative coaching is that its starting point is helping people to be more aware of their current practices and the consequences before they are introduced to its new practices (and better consequences). We taught the Mapping the Field tool and two Applied Mindfulness practices (one inner-focused and one outer-focused) to the pilot teams and sent them out to observe and document their current uses of coaching. We collected their findings and used them to develop a customized training program that addressed their specific gaps and needs.
The second phase of the project involved integrating the core narrative coaching model in many of the core processes of the organizations itself. This was made possible because narrative coaching is based in the human process of change and enhances how people already communicate rather than attempts to replace how they communicate. The first of these initiatives was to shift their program for potential partners from a rigorous assessment center to a vigorous developmental experience. Other initiatives included shifting how performance feedback was given, how talent was assessed, how coaching was measured, and how teams went to market and talked with clients. We used the Whole Brain tool to more holistically develop the leaders so they could coach people with different preferences in terms of how they saw the world and formed their stories.
Results
One of the reasons that these programs were successful was that every team that participated in the project sent a representative to serve as their coaching champion. Each of these 200+ champions took on projects in their team based on their most pressing coaching needs as one of the requirements for participating in the workshops. That meant at any point in time hundreds of experiments were going on about how to bring coaching alive in the organization, the results of which we made available to every other team in the project. We also created an internal wiki to make all of the coaching resources available to everyone in the firm.
We used tools such as Mapping the Field and Applied Mindfulness to enable people to see coaching as a way of working rather than as just a specialized practice, which increased its spread across the organization. This open source and decentralized approach democratized coaching—even beyond the leaders and champions—and led to a much greater impact. As a result, employee engagement scores and retention went up as did their access to and satisfaction with internal coaching. More broadly, the organization adopted a coach approach to their learning and development programs and processes.
Insights
- Coaching needs to be incorporated in every aspect of an organization in order to have its highest impact. This is largely because many of the drivers of change in individuals, teams and organizations are environmental not personal. Narrative coaching works well here because it works with people’s actual stories and address both personal and cultural narratives.
- Coaching best if it is framed in everyday language and practices so that it is seen as enriching what is already happening rather than introducing more jargon about what should be happening. Narrative coaching is well-suited for this because it is based in a natural process of change not an artificial construct for conversation.
To Learn more…
In partnership with WBECS (World Business & Executive Coach Summit) I recently hosted a number of complimentary Narrative Coach Immersion Training sessions
These sessions have been eye-opening, transformative and insightful - and continue to exceed expectations within our Coaching community. Incase you missed the sessions, we have made the recording available for a limited period of time.
So if you’re curious to experience Narrative Coaching and discover the holistic, mindful and results-driven way to coach for yourself and with your clients, click the link below to watch the full recording at no cost: https://narrativecoach.com/social/
Author: Dr David Drake founded and runs the Center for Narrative Coaching & Leadership and has studied human dynamics for 30 years – with a particular passion for change and transitions. What this means for David’s clients is that he can help them separate the signal from the noise to focus on what matters most. As an integrative practitioner he draws on a rich academic and consulting background in helping clients understand their own stories and liberate themselves. David has worked on narrative coaching, change and leadership initiatives for 70 organizations, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Google, Nike, PwC, Westpac and the Australian and US Federal governments. He has trained over 10,000 people in 14 countries in his methods and has started a global community of licensed Narrative Design Partners to bring this work to the world in new ways.