Building a Coachability Culture: A New Catalyst for Impact

In recent years, organizations have invested heavily in building coaching cultures. One of the most robust recent global studies cites nearly $3 billion dollars spent annually for organizational coaching initiatives, such as coach-skills training for managers. To maximize the impact of coaching practices and cultures, some innovative and dynamic organizations are starting to add a new catalyst for improvement by investing in the coachability of leaders and the workforce.

Prompting these increased investments is a rapidly growing body of research highlighting the great value of coachability for organizational effectiveness. For example, highly coachable leaders have been found to foster greater levels of employee engagement and retention. Across employees (i.e., leaders and individual contributors), research shows highly coachable individuals achieve significantly higher levels of performance, agility, and promotability. In fact, one study indicated coachability matters more than the coaching skills of the manager for learning, performance, and agility. As such, the impact of focusing on coaching without coachability may prove costly. Investing in workforce coachability can be a catalyst to complement organizational improvement initiatives, such as coaching practices, leadership bench-building, DEI training, and workforce upskilling.