The growth of coaching culture within the UK’s police force is now stalling at a senior level. Unlimited Potential shares lessons from working with the police in recent years. Karina Hulstrom reports
Unlimited Potential has spent the past four years exploring and supporting coaching culture development in seven police forces around the country. Here’s what we’ve learnt.
It’s not an uncommon scenario.
The intention or even desire to create a coaching culture is there – in-house coaches have been trained, initiatives have swung into action and then … nothing. It’s like the engine cuts out and those heading up the project are destined to forever taxi the runway.
It’s notoriously difficult to establish a coaching culture in any organisation, but there are some very specific challenges that come with the public sector and, in particular, police forces.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that our hard work has started to pay off. Results from Unlimited Potential’s EMBARK coaching culture assessment tool showed significant inroads have been made. For example, at ‘workforce’ level (pre-management) one force received a score of 56% (where 100% represents a fully established coaching culture). This was evident mostly through participants’ belief in each other’s coachability and openness to try it, along with their active involvement in coaching activities.
Unlimited Potential’s managing director, Tim Hawkes, says: “Conversations and roundtable discussions also revealed that coaching skills are being well used to debrief difficult situations and talk about personal issues at the lower ranks of the force.”
Unlimited Potential associate, Dave Spencer, worked as a police officer for 30 years in a variety of operational and strategic roles before becoming a coach. He feels it’s clear that “there is real passion and fire for developing a coaching culture; there just isn’t a sufficient oxygen supply to keep that fire going.”
The oxygen? Active support from the top.
EMBARK results consistently highlighted senior leaders as the weakest area in the forces we assessed.
Throughout the four years, participants from seven different forces also alluded to the need to “target the senior team to get them pulled on board”. One participant explained: “We need to address coaching at the senior officer level, then we can narrow the gap between the top and bottom of the organisation.”
What are the barriers at a senior level?
As with most organisations, the vast majority of the challenges police senior leaders face are a compounded version of those faced by everyone else. This is due partly to the ‘top-down trickle’, and partly to wider circumstances.
Public sector pressures
All organisations need to think about how they spend their budgets and to demonstrate return on investment but for a publicly funded organisation it goes much further than that. There needs to be transparency and a level of justification that will stand up to intense public scrutiny. This forces senior leaders to prioritise initiatives that deliver clear, measurable (ideally quantitative) results.
Leadership development of all kinds tends to produce qualitative results in areas that don’t often have an immediate, obvious impact on the frontline service. Although improved leadership ultimately makes a substantial difference to all aspects of the service, it takes a bit of time for this to manifest.
Though senior leaders understand the strong benefits of a coaching culture, those benefits are hard to explain and demonstrate publicly.
Time
Calendars are more squeezed than ever and many senior leaders across all industries and sectors are struggling to prioritise the ‘important’ over the ‘urgent’.
Culture
Police forces are traditionally – understandably – hierarchical in nature. Though it’s easy to comprehend the need for this, it presents two key challenges when developing a coaching culture:
1. The value placed on experience and expertise can overshadow the value of enabling someone to explore and discover solutions for themselves, eg: the coaching approach.
2. Leaning towards ‘command & control’ can make adopting a coaching style of leadership feel uncomfortable.
To the first point, police are, in many ways, trained to ‘problem solve’. Not attempting to ‘fix the problem’ can, for some, feel like taking away the thing they take the most pride in.
To the second point, roundtable participants said:
“We are command & control. The challenge is having the time to be able to have the coaching conversations. Are they considered important?”
“Do execs hold a view that they set strategy and the delivery is then someone else lower down’s responsibility?”
There are two elements to this:
a) How senior leaders view and engage with coaching
b) How they are perceived to view and engage with coaching
The latter has the added consequence of determining whether the rest of the organisation feels safe to treat coaching as a priority. Giving time to this will always mean taking time away from something else that is perhaps more easily quantifiable or ‘politically aligned’.
Understanding
One of the first steps towards developing a coaching culture is ensuring everyone in the organisation knows what coaching is – and isn’t.
Unlimited Potential’s EMBARK tool assesses a culture according to three ‘maturity levels’:
- Knowing The belief and knowledge that coaching exists, with an understanding of what it is, maybe some training is taking place and reading of coaching books and materials.
- Doing Actively using coaching techniques within the workplace and being aware of when individuals, teams, and organisations are using coaching techniques.
- Being Coaching is a way of life, fully understood and delivered in a meaningful way with knowledge of key tools and techniques effective in developing individuals. The coaching is self-sustaining when individuals are in the ‘being’ state
It may come as a surprise to people who don’t work in this field, but the natural order of these stages isn’t always followed. In the case of the police forces we worked with, there were clear examples of ‘doing’ without ‘knowing’. In other words, individuals reported the use of coaching techniques but demonstrated a low level of understanding about what coaching is and how it differs from other interventions like mentoring. This happened particularly at ‘middle manager’ and ‘workforce’ level which could be symptomatic of the command & control culture: following through on ‘instructions’ and perhaps paying less attention to the ‘why’.
Is it hopeless?
With all these challenges in mind, is it even possible for police forces to truly adopt a coaching culture? We believe the answer is ‘yes’.
The EMBARK results highlight senior leaders as the clear place to start. The first area to look at is commitment.
As a well-known joke says:
“How many coaches does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“Just one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.”
That’s a cliched way of saying: coaching can’t simply be a ‘tick box’ exercise. It’s abundantly clear from our work over the past few years that there’s a genuine desire to develop the culture and a strong recognition of the benefits of doing so. But there’s a vast difference between some people developing some coaching skills and making this your culture.
Openness is key: there’s nothing wrong with deciding to develop some coaching skills and leaving it at that. Setting people on a journey to develop a ‘coaching culture’, however, and then being unable to engage fully with that challenge can eat away at trust and morale – and ultimately do more harm than good.
The balance between command & control and a coaching style of leadership also needs to be consciously worked out. When is each one required? What does each one look like? And so on. This knowledge then needs to be shared with everyone in the organisation. Getting clear on this from the start will avoid inconsistency as each individual sets their own rules and boundaries.
Similarly, clarity around the difference between mentoring and coaching and openly discussing how this may differ from the approach they’re used to will ‘grease the wheels’ significantly. This can be as simple as not mentioning coaching and mentoring at the same time. There were a number of reports of the two being frequently “lumped together” in day to day dialogue, as if interchangeable. The ‘drip feed’ nature of shifting organisational culture make details like this highly significant.
Senior leaders must lead the way on all these fronts and there’s no doubt that, without their full engagement, a coaching culture will never get off the ground. However, it’s crucial not to ignore the reasons why senior leaders are struggling. I use the word ‘struggling’ as there is no doubt from our experience that, in most cases, senior leaders are not opposed to or even indifferent to developing a coaching culture. Quite the reverse. The challenges outlined above are real and highly complex. They need to be acknowledged and addressed.
This change will involve leaving their comfort zone to overcome hierarchical barriers, build psychological safety so leaders and teams are able to share their vulnerabilities throughout this change. They’ll need to take a sensitive approach and stay open minded.
The irony? The approach that would help them the most is the one they are striving for.
About the author
- Karina Hulstrom is director and head of coaching at Unlimited Potential
- https://www.unlimitedpotential.co.uk/