International coach federation global conference, 3-6 October 2012, london
Coaching is seen as ‘cool’ by JOEY Restaurant Group’s employees – and as the average age of its staff is only 25 years old, cool is all.
Redefining coaching as cool, and gaining senior buy-in, were key in getting a coaching culture off the ground, said Marjorie Busse, lead coach/trainer at Essential Impact, which worked with JOEY to take its leadership development to the next level.
The 25 most senior leaders in the Canada-based organisation are accredited coaches.
“It’s almost uncool to be uncoachable,” said Andrew Martin, vice president of HR.
One of the participants in the first programme was Jason Gulliford, regional chef and an accredited coach.
Gulliford and the other participants were sceptical because of how coaching had previously been positioned. But Busse won them over and Gulliford is now one of the organisation’s biggest coaching champions.
Coaching is now about holding people responsible for their own development.
The organisation’s Essential Impact programme, which has coaching at its heart, was recognised last year by the International Coach Federation with an International Prism award.
In the same year, it came in at number 12 on Canada’s ‘Great Places to Work’ list.
Busse said: “The chief operating officer has turned into a champion of coaching for us, and what a difference that has made… [Staff] do it because the big boys do it, if you want them to play, you gotta play.”
On one occasion, the CEO agreed to be coached live. “We had people sitting at the edge of the seat. We knew we
had them because he was prepared to be vulnerable.”
Key was building momentum over time. “We found it takes seven to 30 ‘touches’ to really get new behaviours to stick, so we kept the flywheel going…
Today, we see new managers coming into the programme already familiar with the concepts of coaching and being 100 per cent ready and excited to take on the three days.”
To date the company has trained virtually every salaried employee (about 350) in the three-day coaching programme.
“Sustaining engagement from the first exciting kick-off can be a problem. Unless you pay attention, it just fizzles. And there are plenty of distractors: budgets, new initiatives, time, labour unrest – these are things leaders should be coached about,” she said.
“Enthusiasm is the secret ingredient of both JOEY’s sauce and the sauce of coaching,” she noted.
The coaching culture strategy is built on four pillars: external coaching, manager-as-coach, internal coaching and peer coaching.
Helping to hold up these pillars are redefining coaching, coach training, ‘touch backs’ (ways to get people to touch coaching again), audits, and corporate champions.
The three-day coach training programme was delivered between 2009 and 2011 to 300 managers.
Volume 7, issue 6