Nokia is a global manufacturer of mobile devices and mobile multimedia and applications. It offers mobile devices and solutions for voice, data, imaging, games, multimedia and business applications.
Nokia places a high priority on ensuring that all its employees are performing to their full potential. The company has an extensive raft of learning and development opportunities for all employees and there is strong support for continuous learning. The company’s performance management system is closely linked with learning and development so that every individual has a good picture of how they are performing, their development needs and how the company can help them prepare for their next career move.
The company has a learning and development strategy where 70% of development should take place on the job, 20% through networks and relationships, and 10% through formal development activities. Coaching activities support the first two strands of the strategy and the company has a range of coaching arrangements in place that enable it to respond flexibly to individual development needs. Nokia actively supports coaching but has chosen not to put rigid processes in place to manage its coaching activities.
Towards a coaching culture
Nokia makes a substantial investment in coaching. Line managers are trained and encouraged to coach their teams. The company also draws upon a selected pool of external coaches and, to a lesser extent, internal coaches. Coaching is becoming an integrated part of both the daily performance management and the more formal people management processes. In sales and marketing, for example, there is a stronger focus on performance. Coaching tends to focus on sales skills as a way of helping the organisation improve its overall business performance.
Coaching can be stand alone or a follow-up process to help reinforce learning from other development opportunities and ensure the individual continues on their ‘learning journey’.
The company believes that its coaching activities are both enhancing its leadership capability and helping build a coaching culture. The company also believes that coaching has a beneficial impact on employee retention and engagement: ‘People who are coached feel more engaged and are more likely to stick around rather than leaving during the tough times,’ says an HRD manager.
Managers believe a coaching culture can be seen, as expressed by a senior manager, in ‘daily practice and behaviour. Everyone understands how coaching can help their development. The support is everywhere. Everyone supports and enables each other’s growth. People can ask for support without worrying that others think they are lacking something or needing someone to tell them what to do.’
The role of line managers
Managers understand the value of coaching because they receive training in coaching skills themselves. A senior manager comments, ‘Coaching is a fundamental part of a leader’s and manager’s role. Every employee is entitled to be coached by their manager.’ When Nokia employees move into their first leadership role, they receive training in basic coaching skills. As they develop as managers and leaders, they receive further training in advanced coaching skills.
Coaching is used flexibly by different parts of Nokia. Individual business groups work with the HRD team to define how coaching can help develop their leadership capabilities in the context of their business needs and situation. In sales and marketing, for example, coaching by line managers has been used to help staff going through the ‘value selling’ training programme to apply what they had learned to their daily job.
Some of this discussion focuses on creating a shared understanding of coaching and agreeing the boundaries between coaching and mentoring. Once this framework has been agreed, it is left to line managers and their direct reports to decide on whether coaching is an appropriate development option.
Line managers may well discuss coaching in the context of agreeing an individual’s personal development plan (PDP). The conversation will centre on the individual’s development needs, learning styles and future career aspirations. Line managers also consider the potential benefits of coaching to the individual, their team and the wider business group. 360-degree feedback is also used to identify development needs. Such feedback may also be used after coaching to assess behavioural change.
Although the line manager is effectively the coaching sponsor (they must pay for coaching when an external coach is chosen), Nokia emphasises that ‘coaching should begin with the motivation of coachees’. Coaching is never imposed but only offered to individuals who are committed to making the most of this development opportunity.
Typically, line managers discuss the option of coaching with their direct report and then involve HRD in the task of defining the coachee’s development needs. HRD then helps the line manager to find an appropriate coach. The decision of whether to use an internal or external coach is based on the needs of the coachee and the development resources available. When internal coaches are used, this tends to arise out of informal relationships, with an individual or line manager contacting other line managers or members of the HRD team. ‘Our line managers are often very busy but some of our best coaches believe in coaching and just do it as a natural course of action,’ comments a senior manager.
Coaching is also an important offering in some leadership programmes. Participants on these leadership programmes have the opportunity to be assigned a mentor. This is commonly someone from the senior leadership team who works in the relevant area of Nokia or who has expertise that would be valuable to the coachee.
The company has a pool of suitable external coaches that it draws upon when no suitable match can be found among its internal coaches. Nokia acknowledges that external coaches:
- can bring a valuable external perspective
- grant the coachee access to a valuable external network
- tend to challenge the coachee more than an internal coach
- are more able to initiate ‘real’ conversations about difficult personal or organisational issues
- have more time to devote to the coaching relationship.
Ongoing challenges
Nokia believes that there is widespread recognition of the value of coaching but that it still has a way to go to develop and expand its coaching capability.
The company’s ongoing goal for the future is to try to establish consistent high standards in the coaching skills of line managers so that employees receive good coaching at every stage of their career, regardless of the business group or region in which they work. The company also believes that the return on investment in learning and development will be greatly improved if line managers are adept at helping their staff put learning into practice after any form of training and development process. Another goal is to develop an internal coaching provision, especially through informally identifying and supporting effective coaches.
There is not yet a consistent approach to evaluating coaching across the global organisation. Many coaching activities are effectively evaluated by virtue of their inclusion in an individual’s PDP. HRD professionals also tend to keep an eye on coaching relationships and hold the occasional informal chat with a coach. Nokia does not tend to evaluate coaching relationships through a separate formal process. The company relies on ‘repeat business’ as a good indication of success. A manager explains, ‘The way we look at it is that these coaching relationships do exist and they probably wouldn’t exist if they were not working. We think coaching works because it keeps happening.’ However, more formal evaluation may become necessary if the company extends its use of external coaches.
As yet, Nokia’s coaching activities are to some extent unstructured, with much discretion left to individual line managers. HRD’s role is largely facilitative and encouraging, but this may well need to become more structured in the future if the scale and scope of coaching keeps growing.
Nokia may also do more to build its coaching capability through tapping into its various coaching pools. Currently, there are a limited number of forums scattered across the global business where coaches can talk together or coaching skills can be shared and disseminated. If the company is serious about embedding a coaching culture, it may need to pay more attention to how it can leverage coaching skills to the next level across the global organisation.