Cultural shifts in business don't happen overnight. A revolutionary cultural change in a corporate setting isn't consummated with scattershot applications of coaching tools, techniques, and haphazard mentoring.

How Coaching Overhauls the Culture

An absolute cultural makeover entails that companies fully embrace coaching in their management from the top to the bottom of their organizations. That is, companies must employ coaching and mentoring methodologies everywhere, and not in isolated spots and chosen moments. The companies that fully implement coaching as a managerial art are the ones that are radically altering their colors.

A cultural overhaul in operations means that the old way of doing things — planning, decision making, problem solving, rewards, promotions, and so on — is supplanted with a fresh new way of running the entire show. So, if you're managing as a coach in one department of the organization, a coach is running the office in another department. And coaches are likewise in place and managing on the next level in the company, too.

One of the most conspicuous aspects that distinguishes traditional, directive-style management from coaching is that coached employees, unlike those in other organizations, are welcomed into the decision-making process, encouraged to be self-sufficient, and made to feel an integral part of the company.

Dysfunctional Cultures Can Be Tough to Change

Ideally, a corporate family, like any family, should respect all the members within it. Think of a dysfunctional family with parents who raise their children in a crude and contemptuous atmosphere. You know how it goes — the kids are always put down and are cruelly mocked. And it invariably starts at the top (just like in business).

Mom badmouths Dad. Dad strikes back at Mom. Any of their kids' hopes and dreams are squashed and deemed unrealistic or foolish. Guess what? The kids will likely grow up and repeat this noxious process all over again with their own kids.

Corporate families that practice this same pestilent pattern of contempt never recognize the vast human potential of their employee pool. Instead, they hire people to work in specific jobs and do nothing to foster further learning and expansion of their knowledge and skills. Because there are no challenges and opportunities for advancement, these dissatisfied folks leave their jobs sooner rather than later, and the process is repeated over and over again.

Coaching is the best managerial method for making the workplace both a productive and a contented place. And the reason is that coaching and mentoring and their tools and techniques are designed to do just that. No other managerial methods marry productivity with satisfaction in such a conspicuously coherent way.