Many organisations invest in coaching training for their leaders and internal coaches. Two inspiring days, new conversation techniques, good intentions.
Three months later, things are back to how they were. Not because the training was bad, but because nothing follows: no space to practise, no mirror, no depth.
A coaching culture doesn’t emerge in two training days. It grows by doing.
The leader as coach
Coaching leadership sounds simple: ask more, tell less. In practice it asks something different of a leader, and just as much of an internal coach. Allowing the other person to find their own answer, even when that takes longer. Trust instead of control.
That is not a skill you learn once. It is a way of being present that takes practice and reflection. On Monday morning, with a deadline looming, almost everyone falls back on telling and fixing. That is where the work is.
From one coach to a culture
One good internal coach makes a difference for a few people. Six leaders who work on their coaching stance together for ten months change how people talk to each other across an organisation.
That is the difference between offering coaching and building a coaching culture. In the first case coaching is a service. In the second it has become a way of leading.
Coaching leadership as the foundation for coherence
Organisations change constantly. Teams work remotely, departments each have their own pace, structures follow one another. What is missing then is rarely a new plan. It is coherence: the sense that people are working on the same thing and truly understand each other.
Coherence cannot be organised in an org chart. It emerges in the everyday conversation between leader and team member, between colleagues and between teams. Leaders who work in a coaching way make those conversations stronger.
That is why LCS is also available as an in-company leadership programme: a fixed group of a maximum of six leaders and internal coaches, for ten months, built around the international ICF competencies, with a self-assessment at the start and end so you can see the growth.
What would change in your organisation if coaching were no longer a training, but a way of leading?
— Maaike Strack van Schijndel
The LCS 2027 cohort starts on Thursday 21 January. Registration is open.