153: How to Create an Internal Coaching Program for Your Organization

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

After I recorded this episode on how to create and launch an internal coaching program within your organization, I realized that some of you may have follow up questions or want to learn more. I love doing Q and A sessions for my private Pivot Insider community. That's people who support the podcast. You can too@pivotmethod.com Insider and my private Momentum community for small based business owners and solopreneurs. But if you're working within an organization and you want to connect more, ask questions and join me live, please go to pivotmethod.com live one of my intentions for 2020 is going to be to offer more free open call community Q and A sessions from time to time. Of course the regular ones will happen in Insider and Momentum, but I'm also going to offer a sampling and an opportunity for you to attend Pivot for Individuals and Pivot for Managers on having one on one career conversations so that if you want to check out the content and attend a Q and A to talk about building out an internal coaching program, there will be opportunities to do that. So go to pivotmethod.com live and you'll see a list of upcoming events that you can register for. You can also check out my two LinkedIn learning courses, which I'm proud to say are up and running and being used in many organizations. Go to LinkedIn Learning and then search for Figuring out yout Next Move. That's the course for individuals. It's about an hour 20 short videos with accompanying worksheets and then we just launched at the end of 2019 having career conversations with your team. And that's the one for managers, mentors and coaches on how to apply the PIVOT method framework in a coaching or career conversation. I hope those resources are helpful. I look forward to seeing you on an upcoming webinar or Q and A. Visit pivotmethod.comlive to join and check out a list of events and without further ado, let's get into today's show.

One of the best parts about having a podcast is the serendipity popcorn. I never know who I'm going to meet and who is out there listening. Just like you. One of the people that I'm most grateful that the Pivot podcast connected me to last year is a man named Denny Shout out Denny and his wife, who I know both read and have listened to the Pivot podcast. Denny submitted a question about Pivot for organizations, but he also emailed me to ask if I do any work beyond one on one coaching. This created a huge aha moment for me because most of my income comes from working with companies and in fact as of 2020 I'm no longer taking on new one on one coaching clients as I work to build more scalable programs. So Denny's question to me helped spark an entire redesign of what it looks like when you enter pivotmethod.com and how I can speak and demonstrate more clearly the work that I actually do. Many of you know this by now, but I worked at Google from 2006 to 2011 and one of the things I'm proudest of doing during my time there was creating and launching a global drop in coaching program called Career Guru with a passionate team of other people including my dear friend Becky Cotton. And that program still exists and is thriving to this day with many other companies following suit. So before I get into the mechanics of how you can do this and set this up within your organization, I honestly think this is a no brainer and I cannot understand why every company wouldn't offer this. If you work at a large organization, how you could potentially propose a pilot along these lines. But before getting into all that, I'll turn it over to Denny Clark. Denny, over to you.

Hello Denny, My name is Denny Clark. I am with the Florida Department of Children and Families, better known as DCF here. I'm a longtime HR management consultant and I'm working on this problem working with five what we call critical job classes. These are jobs that actually serve people, kids or families by talking to them on the phone or going out to their home investigators. The turnover for these five jobs ranges from 35 to 100%. The details coming from the exit surveys show that there's a lack of career advancement for supervision cited as primary reasons why people leave. I'm trying to see if we can build in a coaching program similar to what you had in place with Google, where we have gurus who are coaching folks around career advancement and management and teaching those types of skills. So that's my challenge. I hope that you can help me. I'm also building a mentoring program to go along with what I hope to be a coaching program, but I want it to be fresh, different, and it.

Looks like the recording got cut off just a little bit there at the end. Denny, thank you for submitting such a great question and for all the wonderful conversations that we've had since. Let me give you a little backstory on what gave me the passion to join this small team as a 10% project to create Career Guru in the first place. In 2007, while I was working within Sheryl Sandberg's online sales and operations organization, I received a coaching session that changed my life. This was before the word coaching and careers revolving around it was ubiquitous outside of the sports arena. I had never experienced coaching. I didn't know what it was. My coach, Eric, asked me straight away, what's your purpose? As plainly as if he was asking me about the weather. I was 23 years old at the time and I started fumbling through my response. I, um, I don't know. To help people. Be more specific. He said, how? Whom? So I took even more awkward steps. I was grasping from unexplored territory in my mind and my soul and I said, hmm, I guess helping young professionals feel less alone and helping people reach their fullest potential. I didn't even know what that meant, but I knew that as a lifelong reader, books had always been my best friends and I loved the work of inquiry and self improvement. So in our next session, unexpectedly, I burst into very non work appropriate sobs from a cramped phone room when Eric asked me about my values this time pointing out that vitality was one I was currently ignoring to my detriment. And honestly, an encroaching depression, my inability to modulate the unlimited free snacks and the fast pace at Google, and just overall unmanaged stress that, if I'm being really honest, probably started in high school, if not earlier, had added the Google 15 to my frame or as I more accurately called it at the time, the Google 30. Once I became a coach, I learned that asking someone a question they've never heard before creates new neural pathways in their brain as they seek to answer it. So what? Eric helped Me do by asking these very direct, powerful questions was help me create new neural pathways and new awareness around who I am, what's important to me, what my purpose is, and why I was so unhappy when I wasn't working out or eating healthfully, and why I felt so stressed. And I've had so many transformational coaching sessions since and now it's so much more a common practice that we would talk about coaching and everybody has a coach, but it wasn't really like that at the time and I was young and early in my career. So in just two sessions, Eric helped me start exercising again. Attend a coach training information session at cti, the Coaches Training Institute, which is where I went through training and got certified from 2008 through about 2009. And he even helped me start a website for young professionals, lifeaftercollege.org that later became my first book. So I had set up that website in 2005, but thanks to Eric's coaching, I turned it into a blog in 2007. And as you all know, that really kick started my entire life trajectory as an author, speaker, coach, and now running a consulting business. So I really have Eric to thank, and I mean all the way up to Sheryl Sandberg for bringing in the Axllent program, which by the way, the founder of Excellent, Fred Kaufman, has been a guest on the Pivot podcast. You can hear me completely geek out in that episode. Just go to pivotmethod.com 97 pivotmethod.com 97 that episode is called Conscious Business, Superconscious Capitalism and the Meaning Revolution with Fred Kaufman, a teacher who changed my life without knowing it. So this confluence of events, Eric being my coach, getting those two sessions, Cheryl feeling that it was really important to bring in Fred Kaufman and Excellent. And this work of conscious business. There's a book called Conscious Business that you just gotta read. At least it really changed the way I think about my work life and just how I show up in general. All of these things had me start connecting and really feeling that I could just be more alive at work and connect with my zone of genius. As Gay Hendricks would say in his book the Big Leap.

Feeling so newly alive at work and starting to work out again and getting energized. I went and asked my manager and his manager for a few more sessions. I felt like this was professional oxygen and they said no. Understandably it wouldn't be fair to others. External coaching was prohibitively expensive. I was too junior and this was part of a one time leadership Training that wasn't going to continue. It wasn't an ongoing offering and we were paying those external coaches like Eric a lot of money. External coaching is expensive. There was an existing internal ENG Advisor program, but as the name would say, it was just for engineers. I was devastated. I could not believe that with Google's perks, everything that was talked about in the media at that time that was so innovative, there were not many companies in 2007, 2008 that were offering on site laundry, haircuts, massage dogs allowed at work, snack rooms, three meals a day, yoga. I mean, the list goes on. But I couldn't understand how we could then turn down a request from employees for the chance to talk about what really mattered. Their lives, their values, their aspirations, their sanity. So I became determined to democratize coaching within the company, to make it free and readily available to any Googler seeking a one on one conversation with somebody other than their manager. This became my mission. I wanted drop in one on one coaching to be as easily available and schedulable as a massage, which was one of the big company perks. And so by expressing this mission and Starting to attend CTI's coach training, I was also able to connect with a few other passionate individuals within the company who were doing things like this with 10% of their time, which as we always joke, was really 110% because we never drop what's part of the core role. You just take on this 10% passion project. And in true Google style, Google was very generous and still is about giving permission to try things out, to be scrappy, to start small, to pilot things. So my friend Becky had already been conducting these informal coaching sessions and there were already several people who were informal mentors and passionate about this. So we formed this task force and, and I share Becky's story in the book Pivot, by the way, in the chapter on lead. In 2008. In 2009, we piloted drop in coaching programs in a very bespoke, scrappy way. We didn't have all the fanciest tools. We didn't have official sign off from the top. We had sign off from the key people that mattered. But we started training managers and directors all over the world to equip them with coaching skills, which by the way, created many aha moments for even the most senior leaders. Things that we would teach them included do way more listening and way less talking. When I do this kind of coach training, I teach a 70, 2010 ratio. 70% listening, 20% powerful questions, and 10% recapping. What you've heard. If you want an amazing book on this, you must read the Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier. That book is just launching and he's been a guest on the Pivot podcast for his first book, the Coaching Habit. And he's also a guest for the Advice Trap, so I'll put the links to those episodes in the show. Notes we teach Managers and directors take the pressure off to solve a career conversation. So often senior level leaders think, well, if someone's coming to me for advice, I need to give solutions. I need to answer their questions. And so managers and coaches have a lot of pressure going in. Flip that completely. A career conversation or a coaching session is about expanding, exploring, brainstorming, small experiments. That's it. Neither of you have to arrive at any answers. And the surest way to create these transformational aha moments is through in the moment. Presence without an agenda, no solving. You don't need answers. And I guarantee if all you do is listen for 30, 45, 60 minutes, that already is such a gift to the person sitting across from you.

Newer coaches also mistakenly think that they need to ask a ton of brilliant questions, that their ability as a coach relies on their unique, original, innovative, superb questions. It's actually the opposite. Ask something very simple, like what Eric asked me, what's your purpose? Or what do you really want? And then five or six times you can ask these two most powerful follow up questions. What's important to you about that and what else? Keep going, keep going. The first answer is just the beginning. It's the surface level. Think of the think of a tree. The first answer somebody gives is the ground level and it's likely not their truest, deepest response. So the more you ask what else? What's important to you about that? You start to get deeper and deeper to the roots of that tree. What really makes this person tick? So I teach this a lot when I'm giving Pivot workshops on setting your one year vision. What does success look like one year from now? Well, don't stop at the first thing somebody says, what else? What else? Keep going. Another big point of advice that a lot of people don't realize is like, get out of the conference room or your office. You can do these as walk and talks or over coffee. I used to do my coaching sessions when I was coaching at Google, walking around the Baylands at our Mountain View headquarters and we would be walking outside getting fresh air, sunshine, vitamin D and movement. Movement also frees your mind. Becky, who I mentioned in Pivot and earlier in this conversation she had a vision of doing coaching while hiking. And now she lives in Utah in a beautiful home, Big expansive view of the Utah mountains. It's just gorgeous. If you look out of her office windows, it's like a postcard.

By teaching these concepts to managers and directors who would give 5, 10% of their time to doing drop in coaching, so no additional cost to the organization, we launched the official Career Guru program in 2010 globally and at the exact same time I was turning in the final manuscript for my first book, Life After College. Thanks to Eric and of course to my managers. Shout out Steve, Kevin, Lori, who had been so encouraging of me growing this outside passion project throughout my time at Google. But I can't say that that blog or book would have happened or me going to CTI and coach training and then putting a lot of those principles in Life After College. The book, which I called a portable Life coach for 20 somethings. I don't know that that would have happened without Eric. He certainly accelerated that process. And in doing so, all of my outside passion projects, that's what helped me land the role on the career development team at Google when that team was formed. So the team didn't exist when I first started at go, but this is a story I often share when I'm talking about pivots within an organization. If you go, prepare yourself. And I showed such a passion for the subject outside of work, that's what actually helped me land the job. Even though I at the time was unqualified, I was not yet at a senior enough level to be one of those drop in coaches. And yet here I was helping create and launch the whole program. So that outside work created a really unique opening for me personally in my career.

You know the rest of the story from my end. Six months later I realized that Career Guru launched Life After College was about to launch. I just couldn't juggle it all anymore. Those were two massive projects that I was working on. So as you all know, I left Google around 2011 and moved to New York. But I still work with them to this day. And I'm so grateful for our ongoing relationship, which is also true to the message that I share in Pivot, that careers and our working relationships are always evolving. There's no there there even when you leave a company or you pivot within a company. It's so fluid now and that can be scary, but it's also really exciting. I said earlier that I cannot imagine why an organization would not create a drop in coaching program. And I really mean that. It's something where everybody benefits. So the people who become gurus or advisors, whatever you call the program in your company, those managers, informal mentors and coach get to give back. They receive additional development opportunities by receiving coach training and then follow up trainings and part of a small tight knit community within the company. And then they get to dedicate 5 to 10% of their of their role, which is often unrelated to maybe what they do for the core business, to doing something that they love. By conducting a few sessions each month.

Employees can release pressure by talking to a neutral third party who isn't their manager or hr, allowing them to problem solve and own their careers. And then they can return to their manager with more clarity for future conversations and one on ones we all know what employee is going to go straight to their manager or HR to say, I'm feeling bored, I'm hitting a plateau, I'm feeling burnt out, I don't know what to do if I should pivot internally or look for work outside. No, they're not going to say that. They're just simply not going to say it. So my big passion with writing pivot and the work I do with organizations is to help introduce judgment neutral language around pivot points and plateaus and pilots. Even within your role, I always say the best pivots start right where you are. We can't always rely on role change or a promotion to feel fulfilled at work. So the pivot method helps people navigate what's next, starting right where they are. But that's not always what people assume. Or if you're hitting a pivot point. A lot of people's first impulse is to look outside, is to look on a jobs board internally or start networking outside the company. So we've got to give people an outlet to talk about what's on their mind in a kind of, as I described earlier, ugly cry sort of way, so you can get clear on what you want to say to your manager and when and how.

Finally, organizations get a chance to offer a heart based benefit that truly makes a difference with minimal budget. I mean, yes, you're taking the time of senior executives to conduct these half hour hour long sessions, but this can change somebody's life and it can keep people who are at the company engaged and fulfilled as they are dedicating such a large part of their lives to work. So in lieu of more unneeded swag, in fact I sent dozens of corporate T shirts to be made into a quilt last year. Those funds can be redirected toward a far more meaningful method of fostering deeper conversations and exploration.

Okay, so if you are somebody who's interested in doing this, in piloting an internal coaching program within your organization, it's not that difficult to set up. There are logistics involved, but the scale and impact make it a no brainer in my opinion. As I've already said, I'm going to share the high level steps and of course if you're looking for support as you do this, this is also I've now done many large scale pivot programs where we use the material to help teach coaches and ramp up coach internally. So for more information you can Definitely go to pivotmethod.com companies and you can see how I can help partner with you and your team. But beyond that, these are the high level steps that you would want to think about.

Initial program design so that's overall goals, workflow timeline, the systems you're going to use, how you're going to measure it, how you're going to determine success of your pilot.

Then recruit your first batch of internal coaches. I recommend 10 to 31 training cohort. Determine your selection criteria so how they're going to apply, will they need to be nominated, will they need manager approval? And then your selection process.

Next you'll want to schedule and deliver some kind of internal coach certification training based on the coaching framework of your choice. So again I teach a simple four stage pivot method for managers and coaches to navigate conversations. You can also use the GROW model that's really popular. You could send your internal coaches to an outside program like cti, although that's more costly and requires usually more budget. And then you want to make sure that they have in depth follow up support and feedback in the next six months while they're all getting ramped up. Because drop in coaching is very different than somebody's role as a manager unless they're a particularly coaching oriented manager.

The next step would be to determine and deploy your signup and measurement systems. So where will people read the Coach bios and FAQs? How can they schedule a session through calendar? How can the coaches let you know what their availability is? What tool will you use to send the post session surveys? Will you send them immediately after the session? And do you also want to measure any bigger changes that happen, say in a one month post survey?

After that you will develop your marketing materials, internal communications or messages, flyers. Maybe you can tie the program in with existing L and D or training offerings. And maybe you have some senior leaders who can also Help kind of roll this out from on high. Doesn't have to happen at the level of the CEO, but within your pilot audience, who would be somebody that people respect, who can encourage people to try out this new program. After that, launch your pilot. Woo hoo, let loose. You're inevitably going to have to troubleshoot things that come up along the way. But after your designated amount of time for the pilot, and it does take time to get traction, the coaches are going to need more practice. Employees often don't sign up right away. They don't really know what it is. They're still kind of hesitant. So it takes time for even the word of mouth to spread. But at some point you'll want to conduct an initial program evaluation and then make revisions based on survey feedback and maybe even focus groups from coaches and coaches.

If it goes well, you'll want to then discuss how you want to scale the program more broadly. So will you increase the sophistication of your tools for scheduling, for surveys, for measurement? What does it look like? If you're currently serving 100 people, what does it look like to serve 1,000 or 100,000?

At some point you're then going to want to look at longitudinal data. So of the coachee cohort, people who have received a drop in coaching session, at least one. Can you compare that with your annual employee survey? You can take a random sample of employees and then you can compare that to the sample of people who've gotten a coaching session and see does their engagement, satisfaction and retention improve.

If your company doesn't yet have an annual survey. Denny who? Denny Clark, whose question kicked off this episode. He recommended the Gallup Q12 and that looks like a fantastic baseline offering. So check that out. I'll put the link in the show notes.

As for what happens in these sessions, they're confidential. There's going to be certain topics that advisors need to report to HR like abuse, harassment. And you'll need to get clear within legal and HR within the company of what that is and make it clear on the internal coaching signup page that that's part of the protocol. But beyond that, advisors will help coaches navigate tricky career related subjects, things like planning for a conversation with their manager, navigating the culture, addressing issues like burnout or frustration, working on stated professional development goals like leadership development, time management, presentation skills and Google people. Later piloted different types of gurus, even new mom gurus, diversity and inclusion and equity access gurus. Like that wasn't the official name, but I know diversity has expanded now to include diversity, equity, access, inclusion. So there may be subjects that you have or topics or important areas within your organization that require maybe an extra training or people who have an extra passion. For example, the new mom gurus. These are women who returned to work and maybe struggled with balancing their work and new baby at home and the mental emotional time pieces of that. So it can be really comforting for somebody to be able to sign up with gurus who who have specific experience. Although we always teach with coaching, you don't. You do not have to be an expert on whatever the person wants to talk about. And sometimes, sometimes it's better not to be because you go out of problem solving mode and more into curiosity.

So if you can run a pilot with a small cohort, my mantra Let it be easy, let it be fun and start with a small enough group that nobody's going to tell you no, it doesn't require a ton of time or resources. You can pilot this with free software like Google Forms. I use Typeform for a lot of surveys. There are ways to sort of jerry rig this together or frank an app your way to a program before you get full internal approval and support. But by doing a pilot, you'll at least get the data you need to make the case for rolling it out more broadly. As we always said at Google launch and iterate, what do you have to lose? If you have questions about this or you are looking for support again, you can visit pivotmethod.com companies that will give you a sense for the work that I'm doing today. And I want to circle back and say big thanks to Denny Clark for the inspiration for this episode, for submitting a question, and for all the great conversations in the time since. Thank you Denny and I hope those of you who work within organizations found this helpful. I look forward to hearing your feedback on this episode and happy coaching and piloting if you do run some experiments.

That's a wrap for today. Don't Forget, go to pivotmethod.com live to ask any follow up questions in a link live Q and A call with me on this subject and to check out future webinars that I'll be offering in 2020.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.