Organisational context
The Children’s Society is a leading national charity and service provider delivering solutions through a network of over 50 projects. The society has approximately 800 employees and over 10,000 volunteers. Through pioneering research and influential campaigning, The Children’s Society defends, safeguards and protects the childhood of all children.
The organisation’s key areas of work are:
- runaway children at risk on the streets
- children in trouble with the law
- refugee children facing exclusion
- disabled children without a voice.
The organisation is currently facing a range of challenges, not least the requirement to grow income and constrain costs. In addition, The Children’s Society is aiming to work more collaboratively with children and young people, increasing direct working with them and involving them more actively in decision-making. The society wishes to strengthen and measure the impact of its practice, research, policy and campaigning, becoming known as a ‘thought leader’ in its sector and beyond.
The implications for coaching
The Children’s Society increasingly has to deal with the dynamics of a rapidly changing world and as a result has recognised a need to strengthen local accountability and develop managers and leaders who are capable of growing the business. To enable these goals to be met, a new leadership style is being cultivated to move people away from a command-and-control leadership style towards a model of collective leadership. The Children’s Society believe coaching can help change and embed a new culture within the organisation by empowering people at the grassroots to take responsibility and develop accountability.
Coaching in The Children’s Society
The Children’s Society doesn’t have a formal strategy for its coaching activities, but coaching does form part of its emerging approach to management and leadership development. The Society’s management team aspires to develop a coaching culture, and a series of initiatives have been undertaken to introduce coaching to the organisation:
- six-month coaching contracts for senior managers with external coaches
- a series of coaching skills workshops to build up internal coaching skills and capabilities
- formal, external training for some HR professionals to become internal coaches
- coaching by internal and external coaches to support key individuals taking part in a development programme
- workshops on ‘Performance and Development Coaching’ for middle and senior managers to develop their coaching approach and style
- the introduction of action learning-style peer coaching groups, which will encourage mutual support and progress for people in dealing with ‘live’ issues.
To date, coaching activities have been well received. However, those managing coaching services and activities believe that demonstrating tangible results will be critical to its ongoing success.
Interestingly, one of the main barriers to coaching is understood to be the dominant ‘training culture’, where employees assume they must attend a training course to be able to learn to do something. Instead, The Children’s Society sees itself on a journey towards a model of work-based, self-managed learning, with employees being offered a wider variety of ways to learn new skills and capabilities. Those people who have had positive experiences of coaching have become really powerful advocates in promoting and embedding coaching.
The Children’s Society’s plans for developing an internal and external coaching network all sit within their aspirations for changing the leadership style and culture, and meeting business goals. Developing a coaching culture is understood to be an important element in achieving their organisational strategy.
Learning so far and next steps
One of the key challenges for The Children’s Society has been the culture change that coaching is required to support. There is a tension between the past culture of process and control and the expectation that managers will coach, which is a freer, more empowering and creative process. Nevertheless, coaching has been invaluable in helping people to manage change within the organisation.
Kate Thompson, Learning and Development Manager, reflects that it has been helpful to offer guidelines that describe the purpose, aims, scope and boundaries of coaching – but that it has not been necessary to define a specific coaching strategy.