Building Coaching Culture in a Crisis

This post is the third post in the "Training in Turbulence" series, focused on talent development during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting workplace coaching, forcing those of us who work in talent development to reconsider what we mean when we talk about "coaching culture." Suddenly, the old goals no longer seem as important. The old coaching scripts no longer seem as relevant. So where do we go from here?

The past: The few coached by the fewer

To understand how coaching must change in this time of crisis, we must first look at how we practiced coaching in stable conditions. In the decade before COVID-19, coaching was primarily provided to business leaders. Some companies had started to experiment with peer-to-peer, in-the-moment coaching models, in an attempt to infuse the practice of coaching throughout all levels of the organization.

Still, the most commonly practiced form of coaching was in service to senior leaders. Structural rigor defined the practice, rendering coaching as something that sat on the periphery of most organizational cultures. Some estimates suggest that executive coaching created over one billion dollars in annual economic activity before the pandemic. Prior to 2020, 53,000 coaches provided formal, 1:1 guidance to managers and executives. Two-thirds of all coaching practitioners focused their business on executive-level coaching. By contrast, only one-third of coaching practitioners worked with non-manager employees. Why the disproportionate focus on executives, a level of professional attainment to which only 7% of workers aspire? Perhaps because executive coaching is a relatively lucrative practice, with practitioners billing an average of $400/hour.

Executive coaching practitioners were and still are highly-credentialed. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is among one of several credentialing authorities to the coaching profession. To attain their certifications, one must complete over 60 hours of formal training and over 100 hours of formal coaching experience. Holders of ICF’s highest credential, the Master Certified Coach, complete 200+ training hours and 2500+ hours of coaching experience. Such credentialing expectations have spurred the development of a cottage industry dedicated to professional coaching. Myriad universities and business schools now offer professional coaching certificates, provided for a substantial tuition fee. While these training and credentialing standards provide necessary standards to a relatively new profession, they establish an implicit expectation that being a coach requires expenditures of energy, focus, and finances. The popularity of the executive coaching model conditions us to imagine coaching as a professionalized activity deployed to support a small percentage of our workforce.

The future: The many coached by the many more

In the wake of coronavirus, the bottom may fall out of the executive coaching market as companies look to reduce fixed expenses. But even if the executive coaching market doesn’t contract, a recession-ready workforce requires a different approach, one that began to emerge before the pandemic.

To develop talent amidst disruption and volatility, today’s L&D professionals must seek to integrate coaching practices, indeed even habits, at all levels of the organization. The talent developer in turbulence must move away from an overreliance on formal, executive models and enabling everyone to be a coach.

In this era of anxiety and uncertainty, our workplaces need coaches capable of converting negative sentiment into creative, goal-directed action. Our workplaces need such individuals not just in the C-suite, but in every operation within a company’s portfolio. To quote best-selling author Michael Bungay Stanier, the training professional must now work to ensure that everyone in the organization becomes more “coach-like.”

Unfortunately, few have yet to see the value in being “coach-like” in the workplace. We’re not even at the point where every manager is comfortable in coaching their teams. Coaching remains the practice of credentialed, full-time practitioners. There are five full-time coaching practitioners for every one manager or leader who uses coaching skills in their day-to-day work. This lack of involvement with coaching comes despite a 2014 finding from CEB (now Gartner) suggesting that an integrated approach to coaching, in which individuals provide in-the-moment coaching to one another, can increase performance by 12.2%.

Michael Bungay Stanier on coaching in a crisis

Quarantined in my house in Madison, WI in March 2020, I sat down for a Zoom call with coaching expert and best-selling author Michael Bungay Stanier. I asked Bungay Stanier, the author of The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap, how the practice of coaching might evolve, and how talent developers could support coaching in uncertain times. As we talked, Michael maintained that coaching in a time of coronavirus would require the development of coaching habits and practices for everyone in the organization.

Michael shared that coaching in a time of uncertainty is about helping one’s peers to differentiate data from judgment. “Those who are coach-like, regardless of whether they consider themselves actual coaches, help others to separate fact from feeling,” said Bungay Stanier. “It’s only when coaches help separate fact from feeling that they can help to determine an effective set of actions. The most powerful coaching questions that we all should be asking in a time of anxiety and ambiguity are ‘What do you know to be true?’ - And as a follow-up, what are you going to say yes to, and what are you going to say no to?”

In a workplace characterized by apprehension, everyone is going to have moments in which we will act on that which is objectively false. Coaches are those who can ensure our actions rest upon a solid foundation.

“Someone who is coach-like prevents their peers from being swept up in a wave of active uncertainty and anxiety,” suggests Bungay Stanier. “They facilitate action based on the data. They recognize that every action requires saying no to something, for example, anxiety, and saying yes to something else, for example, self-care, breathing, and grounding oneself in the truth.”

Michael recognizes that in moments of uncertainty, even those who aspire to be coaches struggle to maintain a posture of curiosity and inquiry. There are two harmful tendencies in these situations. The first tendency is to stop asking questions. Without coaches who ask great questions, all of us struggle to find the best possible course of action. The other tendency is to launch into advice-giving, what Bungay Stanier refers to as the “Advice Monster.”

“Part of what drives advice-giving and receiving is a hunger for certainty,” says Bungay Stanier. “So, COVID-19 and other crises will surely awaken our Advice Monsters. In these moments, there’s a wiring we have where we’re all hungry for a sense of certainty, even when that certainty is misguided.”

While professional coaches are often reknowned for their ability to give great advice, coaching and advising are intrinsically different practices. Whereas coaches empower individuals to find their own, unique path to goal attainment, advisors provide recommendations based on someone else’s experience. Author Henry Kimsey-House summarizes the two practices as follows: “Advisors stand in front of you and face you. You ask them their opinions and they give them to you, based on their experience and background. Coaches, however, stand next to you, facing the same direction, and look to the horizon saying, ‘Where do you want to go?’”

Advice isn’t problematic in and of itself, though its applications are limited, particularly in an economic climate when nearly everyone is facing never-before-seen challenges. For Michael Bungay Stanier, the problem with advice is that it implies that the one receiving advice is inadequate to meet the challenges of the times and that they are somehow not “enough.”

In a recent TedX Talk, Michael describes how giving advice implies that the other is not “smart, wise, fast, moral, or experienced enough.” For Bungay Stanier, the best-case scenario is that the recipient ignores the advice. The worst-case scenario is that it leads to a certain level of learned helplessness. With the need for individuals and organizations to take bold, innovative, and pragmatic actions amidst a time of recession, we need to pull coaching back from the entrapments of advice.

Bungay Stanier clarified that there remain cases in which some advice could be useful during an appearance on Hallely Azulay’s TalentGrow Podcast. He suggested that coaching has its greatest impact when we stop rushing to provide advice.

“I’m not saying stop giving advice or never give anybody any advice at all,” said Bungay Stanier on the podcast. “I’m merely saying, can you slow down the rush to give advice? What you’ll find is the longer you can wait, the more likely it is that they’ll figure it out by themselves. And if they don’t, then the more likely it is that your advice will be more focused, more useful and more likely to be acted upon.”

Crises provide us an opportunity to develop a coaching culture. If we want to make coaching a widespread habit in a time of turbulence, we need talent developers who can train us all to ask coaching questions. We need trainers who can slow our inclination to provide advice. And we must all resolve to follow Bungay Stanier’s advice in saying less, and asking more, at all levels of the organization.

Training in Turbulence, Part Two: Instructional Design During a Recession

If training departments are going to affect positive change or build any meaningful capacity during a recession, they must do so with a commitment to lightweight implementation, or a focus on learning culture over training courses.

Potential 20% reductions in training resources, paired with drop-offs in available learning hours, create an uncertain future for large learning programs. Programs and courses will continue to help employees to develop new, role-required skills. I expect many companies will continue to prioritize their new hire onboarding programs, for example. Still, formal learning, with its hefty administrative burdens like scheduling, content maintenance, and ongoing SME engagement, cannot build a recession-ready workplace.

What we need instead are techniques that enable skill development by rapidly converting theory into practice, and practice into habits. We need a strategy that makes social learning work! Fortunately, these techniques are not unfamiliar to talent development professionals, though they may be peripheral to much of our past work.

By focusing on micro-learning, nudges, and communities of practice, trainers can form a recession-ready learning culture defined by efficiency and efficacy. These three instructional design techniques form a robust "triad" of organizational development in that they can develop skills with little administrative overhead.

The root of this triad is micro-learning, which provides a mechanism for the distribution of essential procedural and declarative knowledge. ATD defines micro-learning as that which “enhances learning and performance in the most efficient and effective manner possible through short pieces of content. Assets can usually be accessed on-demand when the learner needs them.”

Micro-learning is not new to a time of recession. Just before the pandemic, Donald Taylor’s Global Sentiment Survey identified micro-learning as the sixth-hottest trend in L&D, indicating widespread interest in this emerging training tool. But what is new about micro-learning is that it will transition from a tangential measure deployed to support formal learning into a core strategy for the development of essential skills.

Nudges establish the middle note, or the third, of this triad. Whereas micro-learning involves actions to create and ship content, nudges involve actions that shape and optimize behaviors, thus turning theory into practice.

We can define a nudge as a "relatively subtle" action that encourages behaviors that are either individually beneficial or socially altruistic. Google's small cafeteria plates are a commonly cited example of a behavioral nudge. Google famously found that smaller plates lead employees to make more nutritious choices. As a former Google employee, I once shed over fifteen pounds by switching to Google's smaller plates and ensuring my lunches consisted primarily of vegetables served from the front of Google's buffet lines. While talent developers can use micro-learning to demonstrate essential skills for a time of uncertainty, nudges are needed to put skills into action and to ensure that social learning perpetuates skill development.

Communities of practice form the top note, or the fifth, of our triad. Harvard Business Review defines communities of practice as “groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise.” Communities of practice can exist online or offline, within an organization or with like-minded individuals across organizations. They can be broad in scope and complex in operations, such as an international trade organization or a multinational CEO peer group. Or they can be narrow in scope and easily maintained, such as a Slack channel for instructional designers or a group of podiatrists on WhatsApp.

Whether these groups gather virtually or physically, synchronously, or via social media, a community of practice facilitates two needed elements of adult skill development: peer-to-peer learning, and opportunities for reflection. Communities of practice are a powerful form of “social” learning - the third “hottest” global trend in Learning and Development in 2020.

Social learning provides 70% of workplace learning and is especially popular with Millennials and Generation Z. All communities of practice are social learning, though not all social learning rises to the level of a community of practice. The difference is that a community of practice involves a commitment to constancy. Many social learning opportunities are “one and done” - but one can always turn to their communities of practice to take full advantage of social learning. Moreover, in a time of disruption, companies may verbalize a commitment to social learning - when, in fact, their hidden commitment is to avoid investing in L&D! In upcoming blog posts, we’ll reimagine communities of practice as more targeted towards specific skills, more supported by talent developers, and more appealing to workers in uncertain times.

Until the pandemic ends and the recession dissipates, bulky training programs will achieve limited traction. Fortunately, the triad of micro-learning, nudges, and communities of practice provide an objectively better alternative! With these strategies in mind, let us turn in the next blog post to the skills that we must build if our organizations are to withstand these turbulent times.

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@ryanpanzer is an instructional designer for Zendesk and a member of the board of directors for the Association for Talent Development Madison Area Chapter.

Training in Turbulence, Part One: Developing Talent Amidst Disruption and Volatility

The world has never experienced a recession like the one we recently entered. Still, we know that in a recession, the learning and development function tends to experience one of the bumpiest rides of all business units. Recent recessions reveal the extremity with which learning and development resources wax and wane proportionate to business and economic health. Such variability is shown most clearly through resource allocation at the level of the individual learner. When entering a recession, companies invest less money per learner while providing fewer overall learning opportunities. So what will happen to training and development in the coming months?

Most noticeably, companies will cut training investment. According to Workforce.com, investment in employee training and development during the 2008 recession contracted by over 10%. The US corporate training market reduced per-employee training expenditures from $1,202 in 2007 to $1,075 in 2008.

The 2013 ATD State of the Industry Report found that businesses cut training expenditures by an average of 18% during the 2008 Great Recession, with reductions bottoming out in 2010. If such trends carry over into future disruptions, companies will soon start asking talent developers to achieve their results on 80% of their standard operating budgets. If you’re anything like me, thinking about sustaining learning programs with one-fifth less budget causes natural knots in your stomach. A one-fifth reduction won’t just mean fewer courses, printouts, and learner materials. A one-fifth reduction means far less travel, considerably less time with learners, and perhaps even fewer people on learning and development teams.

Budget reduction was not the only effect that the 2008 recession had on training and development. With business leaders regarding training as “the most expensive activity with regard to employee management,” some companies ventured as far as to completely eliminate their professional development budgets. As cuts in expenditures and enrollments accelerated, many executives lamented the appearance of critical skill gaps within their organizations. Still, most businesses slashed travel opportunities for training delivery and facilitation, moving courses online and cancelling programs. Companies were especially likely to reduce investment in programs for “intangible” skills (critical thinking and change management, for example), and to tighten their control over training participation. Some companies even put a two-year moratorium on all learning initiatives.

Exacerbating these difficulties is the perception that training budgets are a “lagging indicator” of an organization’s fiscal health. As businesses recovered from 2008, investment in training sputtered with meager year over year increases. ATD’s 2019 State of the Industry Report found that as companies recovered from the Great Recession, growth in training expenditures hovered near two percent annually, lagging the pace of inflation until 2017.

But not every study of training during crises or recessions concluded that budget cuts were inevitable. It's possible that the coming months will create drastic change for talent developers, but may not lead to immediate resource reductions. A report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills concluded that “institutional support for training activity… changed little between 2005 and 2011 – a period which spanned the 2008-09 recession.”

Their report, “Training in Recession: The impact of the 2008-2009 recession on training at work,” suggests that per-employee investment in training within the United Kingdom was declining for approximately ten years before the recession. According to their analysis, the effect of the 2008 recession on training investment was either neutral or ambiguous. Their findings suggest that the need to see more productivity and innovation out of a smaller employee base created more training opportunities. These data should reassure those who work in talent development. Not every company will slash its investment in training; not every talent developer will be asked to more with less.

Author Elaine Biech, who has written over 80 books on training and development, concurs with the data from the United Kingdom. Her recent works include The Art and Science of Training and The New Business of Consulting, both of which received considerable acclaim, and both of which I highly recommend reading. I sat down with Elaine for a Zoom conversation shortly into the COVID-19 lockdown for a discussion about the future of training in a time of uncertainty. Biech, who is the founder of the L&D consulting firm ebb associates, expressed a welcome note of optimism about the direction of learning relative to the course of the economy. Biech suggested that economic uncertainty previously led to cuts in training, but as training departments have proven their worth, they’ve buffered themselves from the worst effects of cutbacks.

“Every time something like this has happened in my over-forty years of working in this industry, whether it was a political crisis, changes in the labor market, or an economic recession, it hits L&D a little less hard,” she told me. “Every year, organizations see a little more value in training, and investment increases. Today’s executives know that skill gaps exist. They need strong L&D teams who can identify and act on those gaps. They need L&D teams who can serve as trusted advisors. Whether or not this (COVID-19) leads to a prolonged recession, this time will be more positive (for talent development professionals) than the last.”

Whatever our predictions, we also know for certain that disruption, volatility, and economic recessions are always temporary. Investment comes back. Learning hours go back up. Though it took until four years after the 2008 recession, per-employee learning hours eventually hit a new record high in 2012, at 57.7 hours per employee. As businesses recovered from 2008, they did eventually re-invest resources in the form of employee time, as they sought to close the skill gaps widened by the recession.

With so much uncertainty, how can talent developers keep their organizations focused on learning in the recession to come?

In the coming blog posts, we'll construct a blueprint for talent developers looking to build capacity in the most uncertain of times. Each week, we'll publish a post on how talent developers can train in turbulence. Each post features ideas from training thought leaders, data on how training has navigated past disruptions, and concrete ideas that share a commitment to lightweight implementation. Each post explores this challenge through the lenses of micro-learning, nudges, and communities of practice, three tools that can be deployed under limited resources and significant time constraints. The challenge facing our organizations is truly unprecedented. The need for impactful learning and development has never been greater.

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@ryanpanzer is an instructional designer at Zendesk and a member of the ATD-Madison Area Chapter board of directors.