The use of coaching has become very common in organizations these days, and performance consultants have been at the forefront of using organizational coaching for over 30 years. This article intends to answer the following questions:

What exactly does organizational coaching mean?

What does organizational coaching involve? 

What are the benefits of organizational coaching?

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) emphasizes that companies and organizations are interested in increasing their performance in the following areas:

• Enhancing individual and team performance
• Managers and leaders being a coach rather than a boss

The International Federation of Coaching in a 2014 survey of more than 500 large companies in the United States found that coaching enhances the skills and competencies of employees. Also, it has a long-term and systematic impact on maintaining the organization’s talent and financial stability. 

That is why hiring professional coaches or training co-workers in the organization as well as training leaders and managers to do coaching has become very popular in organizations. Organizations use internal or external coaches to develop their most talented individuals.

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as:

Coaching is a kind of continuous partnership between the coach and the client, which helps the coach to achieve the desired results in his personal or professional life by thinking about calming down the client and awakening his inner creativity.

Now, to understand organizational coaching, let us look at the concepts we have learned about coaching in the business environment. When we connect coaching and business, it becomes business coaching. 

The World Business Coaching Association (WABC ) defines it as “to achieve business goals for clients and the organization. In other words, business coaching is “a conscious, forward-looking conversation about empowering an individual or team to achieve an organization’s goals.”

Some coaches may name their niche or specialization as:

• Business and Organizational Coach
• Leadership Coach
• Executive Coach
• Small Business Coach (SMEs Coach)

Coaches that work with businesses usually choose different specialties based on their experiences, knowledge, interests. 

So, what is the difference between these coaches?

The main thing is that their focus is different. For example, executive coaches work with executives and senior executives focused on their development as an executive, Organizational coaches work with organizations focused on the outcome that is important for them.

Here are two examples:

1. Achieving pre-determined outcomes through one-on-one or team coaching:

In this method, organizations use a professional coach for a specific topic and by defining the goals of the coaching program, they move towards predetermined goals with the sponsor (in this case the organization paying for the services) involved in agreeing the goals and progress.

2. Implementing a coaching culture:

Many organizations also try to institutionalize their organizational coaching culture by implementing program whereby their leaders, managers, and supervisors learn how to use the coaching skills as part of their style. They sometimes even invest to have internal coaches by ensuring that some of their staff are skilled to coach someone from other departments, hence giving access to coaching to all employees across the organization.

In both examples above, the benefits are to enhance performance of individuals and teams, increase engagement, create an environment for the individual and team to thrive. This in turn leads to higher sales, productivity, profit, retention, etc.

When organizations bring the strength-based development and focus as a methodology for the coach, manager and leader to think and act, the data shows that the benefits are even more evident and the speed of development towards the desired results increases.

International Coaching Education, ICE has incorporated the strength development in all of the coaching education programs and the students and alumni have seen great progress in their style of coaching and the impact on the client (both individual and teams).

ICF global surveys show that working with a coach at any level in the organization will increase your confidence, and has a positive outcome for the individual and organization. Also, that the number of managers and leaders who have developed their coaching skills has increased year on year. The impact on the individual, team and organization has been noticed when the individuals focuses more on their core talents and abilities. During coaching or coaching education, your awareness about strengths increases. There is a support mechanism so that the talents are developed to achieve the outcomes agreed. This has increased the organizational output pretty much in all of the key performance indicators they have selected such as sales, absenteeism, safety incidents, engagement, talent retention, etc.

Taymour Miri is an ICF master coach and a Gallup certified strengths coach and more recently one of the first 136 coaches worldwide to be awarded an Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching. He has 30 years’ experience in leadership roles and 20 years of experience in coaching. Taymour has trained over 1,500 coaches across five continents and is the founder of International Coaching Education (ICE).