Create Your Organization's Coaching Culture Intentionally

Dom Mas: Hi, you're listening to the Coaching in Organizations podcast, real stories and strategies for building coaching cultures within organizations, with an unapologetic love of group coaching.

I'm your host, Dominique Mas, and I'm the founder at Group Coaching HQ. Today my guest is Katherine Lord, Director of Organizational Member Experience at the International Coaching Federation, and specifically for the Coaching in Organizations section.

I've collaborated with Katherine in many ways, and I am so grateful for the passion and care she puts into all of her work. She's a true advocate for coaching, and I wanted her to help us really set the tone for this podcast by defining what it means to build a coaching culture.

In this episode, we dive into the idea that coaching should support what matters most to the organization. That is what a coaching culture is about, not a coaching program.

Katherine reminds us that it's less about branding and more about how leaders and employees consistently act, manage, and collaborate. It's about the behaviors we see every day and not the beautifully named coaching initiatives. So let's dive in and see what we can learn about building coaching cultures truly intentionally.

Hi Katherine.

Katherine Lord: Hi Dom.

Dom Mas: I'm delighted to have you here, and first I'd like to share a little bit more about you, and then you can let me know if I'm missing anything.

Katherine Lord: Okay.

Dom Mas: You are a community engagement leader who is known for driving organizational growth through innovative program development, strategic stakeholder alignment, and impactful partnership building. You've held key roles at the Council on Social Work Education and the Club Management Association of America, where you led transformative initiatives that enhanced member value and strengthened organizational performance. What did I miss?

Katherine Lord: That's it. That's a great summary.

Dom Mas: Perfect, perfect. So I'm really excited. This is the first ever episode of the Coaching in Organizations podcast, and our goal for this episode is slightly different from the future episodes. Here, really what we want to do is define what a coaching culture is, what it looks like, and how our audience might get started to build one or how they might enhance theirs.

So I'd love to start with this idea that you brought up, that a coaching culture isn't about branding a program. It's really about creating an environment. So we're going to dive into that in a bit, and I think hearing more about your story will help us to unpack this a little bit. You have a background in social work, which is so, so powerful in building partnership and connection, and it's led you to coaching. So tell us a little bit about how you got here.

Katherine Lord: Oh gosh. Well, it's so interesting to, of course, look back now with hindsight and see, oh, I see where the red thread is of my life, but not necessarily knowing it in the moments of change throughout my career. But from early on, Dom, I definitely had visions of being in a helping people profession. I was interested in psychology and then, of course, later social work. I also still sort of have a dream of being an actress, but we can talk about that on a different podcast.

But what I realized is that one of the things I love to do is create intentional community. And this has shown up over and over with every role that I've had. And so I started post-college. I was a business major. Post-college worked for a hospitality group and did events for them. And thinking back, I was essentially crafting meaningful, connected experiences, which, of course, set up the foundation for other roles that I've had.

And then I, from that work, really wanted to understand more about people and systems and leadership, and what I would later learn is called person and environment. I wanted to know how things all sort of worked together. And so that led me to get my master's in social work, which was a phenomenal degree. And while I was in that program, I got to do some clinical social work, which I loved, and really thought that that was going to be my path.

And then my brilliant husband got a job in DC, and so we moved from Colorado, where we were living at the time, to Washington, and that actually is what launched me into the association management world. So I ended up getting this job with the Council on Social Work Education, and then later another association, Club Management Association, and now fast forward, I'm here with the International Coaching Federation. So still in the association world, but now leaning back into these helping professions.

And so when I got to ICF, I'd say overwhelmingly my feeling was, well, where has this been? You know, coaching, I learned about it from day one, and I work, as we'll talk about, I work with organizations and their coaching program leaders. It was like, well, hi people, I didn't know you were here. So not only was I transfixed by coaching itself, but then certainly the work that coaching that was transpiring in organizations. And so amazing alignment of job and purpose here now. So now I get to support organizations in creating intentional culture, and a lot of times that has components of coaching, and so that's why I'm here.

Dom Mas: Thank you so much for sharing that journey. I always love hearing how people got to where they are. And I think your passion for building, and I love that you keep using that word, intentional community, is such an important piece of it. And I've seen you in action creating that community for coaching leaders in organizations, and it's incredibly powerful. In addition to that, you're also a really strong connector. And you really do help build coaching cultures, to be a little bit more specific. And I'm curious what you bring from the social work aspect of your career, previous career, but really still kind of present into this work. So tell us a little bit about that.

Katherine Lord: Yeah, very, very much so. And it sort of feels like once a social worker, always a social worker. I mean, I definitely have a social worker's heart, just now with some new coaching skills and appreciation. As I mentioned, there are lots of social work frameworks, and some of them have actually informed a lot of coaching practice.

One of those pieces, as I mentioned, the person and environment, is looking at how everything around us impacts and receives what's happening with us internally. So you think about the solar system, and the movement of the Earth is impacted and responsive to other things in orbit. And so when I think about coaching and organizations, I'm drawing upon, you know, looking at the organization as a system and what's impacting that system, but then also the individuals that are impacting what's happening within that system.

So it's sort of seeing all of these moving pieces and recognizing that they are all interconnected and that coaching is this thing that can come in and sort of help make sense of how all of these things move and perhaps help them move where we actually want them to go and away from where we don't want them to go. So it's probably a little meta, Dom, to be honest, but it's connecting this. We have people, we have systems, we have the greater world.

Social workers love talking about the micro, mezzo, and macro, and anyone who has worked with me knows that I put that on too. But I think it's a great way to kind of look at the world. What's happening individually, what's happening within a small community, and then what's happening in the greater world.

Dom Mas: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. And I really think this way of framing everything, right? Everything is a system. And not only are we part of the system, but the system is part of us too. And so it's that constant relationship, right? That constant connection that helps us build the cultures that we want to build, and we have to be conscious of it. And I'd love to hear from you, as you've done so much work with ICF, the coaching culture around coaching cultures, what would you say defines a coaching culture? If you have the skeptical executive who's like, oh, why don't we need to build a coaching culture? I don't know, I don't know why they have that voice, but they do apparently.

Katherine Lord: Well, they certainly do. Yeah.

Dom Mas: Yes, yes.

Katherine Lord: Everyone I've met.

Dom Mas: What would you say to them if you had to define what coaching culture is?

Katherine Lord: Well, I hadn't thought of this before, Dom, but I would say at this point, what I would start with is probably a coaching question back at them. I'd say, what matters most to you? You know, I say that sort of cheekily, but in seriousness. Part of it is, well, what do you want your culture to be? And then we look at how coaching helps that. But if we take that aside, I would say a coaching culture is an environment where leaders and employees consistently use coaching mindsets and behaviors, embedding them in daily actions, decisions, management, all in service of driving business results.

Dom Mas: I think you really hit the nail right on the head here, and it goes into how do we measure coaching impact and really what is at the heart of it is how do we connect coaching to organizational goals and strategy. And I also really appreciate that you shared it's not about the fact that coaching exists in the organization formally, like, hey, we're going to have this big initiative where everybody's going to get coached. That's not what we're talking about. It's really when we talked about before, you used that word of intentionality again. So I'm curious, because it doesn't have to be this big woo haw, everybody gets a coach. Like, what does it look like to really create that coaching culture intentionally?

Katherine Lord: Well, to break that word down, intent. There has to be a desire. I have not heard of an organization, and if there's one listening to this, like call me, that unknowingly created a coaching culture. There has to be some, you know, we talk about this more in depth in some of our work with coaching and organizations, but the championing of it and that championing can happen at the C-suite and then it trickles down or can be grassroots effort and rise up.

There's a swell of interest in coaching as a lever to accelerate something else. So when we talk to organizations, they have some kind of challenge, some kind of problem. And it could be profits are great, but hey, we don't know what to do about AI. This is totally changing our industry. And there has to be this look at how we've done things in the past with our L&D programs or with our leadership development programs. It's not aligning exactly how we want to.

So there's an interest, there's an intent, and then it's this somewhat openness to coaching saying, let's try this. Even though coaching has been around for a long time, organizations are still learning like, ooh, let's tap into that and see what we can do.

And then, of course, as you mentioned, when we're talking business, we're talking measurement, we're talking ROI. You have to know what kind of metrics you're interested in evaluating. So it's great if you say, I want to bring in coaching because I want to improve employee morale. All right, there's certainly going to be a lot of qualitative information that would determine if it was a good investment, but what kind of data can you use? Hard data to give you that answer.

Dom Mas: Yeah, yeah. And actually, it's perfect that you're talking about measurement because I think as we're thinking about coaching cultures, it's also important to understand how we might measure that coaching culture, how we might see where we're at so that we get a sense of where do we want to be more intentional in the future.

And so ICF built the coaching culture or the culture compass assessment. So I'm curious if you could share a little bit more about that and what it helps organizations see in terms of their coaching culture.

Katherine Lord: Thank you for asking that. And we're proud of this assessment tool and the maturity matrix that has come out of it. This hearkens a little bit to your prior question about what does this look like and does it have to be, you know, everybody gets a coach, we're screaming from the rooftop, all of that.
What's interesting about the compass and our evaluation of the coaching culture is that it is so rooted in behavior. If you've got posters all over, let's pretend everybody actually works in an office. If there's posters in the lunchroom about, yeah, I know, I don't. Posters everywhere, every, you know, staff email has something about coaching, but you're not actually seeing behavior change. You're not seeing any of the coaching mindset and behaviors that we talk about exemplified in actions. Well, you don't have a coaching culture.

What we're looking at is the suite of behaviors that can be exhibited by employees that staff see in leadership and that employees see in one another. So we devised this assessment that places your organization based on a 22-question survey that employees can take into four categories. So we have ad hoc, emerging, developing, and integrated. And there's lots of information I could, of course, share and that you can find about what these four levels look like, but it's basically a roadmap to say, here's where you are based on the behaviors that are being exhibited by your employees.

And so if you want to move the needle to make it look more this way, here are some ideas and resources. If this looks good to you, A plus. And that I'd really like to underscore. When people see, oh, there's four, I want to be integrated, I want to win, I want to get the highest score possible.

Dom Mas: I want to win.

Katherine Lord: Yeah, I want to win. My fellow type Aers out there. So there is no winning. If you have coaching, if you've heard of coaching, you're winning. If you have a coach, you're definitely winning.
But for different organizations, landing on a particular level may make the most sense. And so for certain companies, having an ad hoc coaching culture, okay, certainly if there were more reasons and plenty of time and, you know, all of the help in the world to get to integrated, perhaps that's something they want to do, but ad hoc might be serving them really well right now.

And similarly with integrated, I have heard from, this has only happened once, but where an organization scored on the integrated and they said, actually, one of the signs we see of coaching being beneficial is low retention. They said, we're so integrated. We actually need less retention. We need some of these people to get out of here. So it's almost there can be too much of a great thing. And they were noticing that some of that was for various reasons that they could tie to the coaching program.

Again, one in the hundreds of companies I've talked to, but just to say it's not about winning because even if you score integrated, which is the highest, the farthest right on the spectrum, it might not be serving your organization in the best way. You might want to scale back.

Dom Mas: Whoa.

Katherine Lord: Isn’t that wild?

Dom Mas: Yeah, wild. Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm stumped. That's so cool.

Katherine Lord: I know. I know.

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Dom Mas: Are there surprises that you've had or that organizations have had when they see their results that you want to share? Because that's wild. Yeah.

Katherine Lord: So that's, yeah, that's an extreme example. I'd say overwhelmingly, people are surprised at how far to the right they are. They kind of come in, I mean, it's like we're our own worst critics and skeptics, and so we do that from an organizational standpoint too. Oh, we take this assessment and it tells us where we're developing, just sort of like the level three out of four. They're like, wow, we haven't even done group coaching yet. You know, so it's sort of an, yeah, for sure.
It's sort of a reminder. It's a reminder that you've probably already done some great work. If you have landed upon the coaching culture assessment, the compass, you probably are doing some great things. And certainly if there's an interest, back to the intent, interest, some good stuff is going to show up. And I also feel like it's very motivating that if for wherever organizations score, they say, oh, wow, this is really great. And the way that the assessment works is that you still get some encouragement on some other things that you could do to strengthen your program or to strengthen your culture. So they say, okay, we've got some bandwidth to push forward a little bit or push deeper. So I'd say that's the biggest thing. People are usually really proud of themselves.

Dom Mas: Yeah, that's wonderful.

Katherine Lord: It's because it's tied to behavior. It's because it's tied to not, as you said, to everyone has a coach. Every team has a team coach. We recognize that that is simply not doable for a lot of organizations. But if leaders use coaching skills, if people become aware of the coaching mindset and certain coaching behaviors, this can percolate through an organization and make huge impact even without the existence of a formal coaching program.

Dom Mas: Yeah, I love that so much. It's always about behaviors, right? That's how we measure leadership. That's how, I mean, when we're coaching, we're always thinking about, well, what are the behaviors that you'd want to see in yourself if you were the ideal person, right? So I think it always comes down to behavior.
I'm curious, Katherine, as we come more towards the end part of this, what would be your best advice to those who are looking to even start feeling that they have a coaching culture in their organization or looking to, you know, do that 3% more? What would be your advice?

Katherine Lord: Well, my first piece of advice would be get in touch with other organizations. And this is the community. This is, and of course, the role that ICF coaching and organizations plays, where we just bring organizations together that are doing this work so that they can share best practices, share challenges, experience programming to help them do exactly what you're describing. So find your community and find those leaders who are doing this work because everybody's sharing similar challenges. I got to show ROI. How do I internally market my program? What are we doing about AI? You are not the only one asking that question. So join us and participate. So that's number one.

Number two, and this comes up a lot, is my tagline is befriend the pilot. Pilot programs.

Dom Mas: Love it.

Katherine Lord: Give so much leash, so much lead to experiment, try it, just get in there and try it. And if you throw pilot on it, people are usually like, okay, Katherine's just like doing her pilot over there. Don't bother her. But do a great pilot. Use some data. Again, talk to the community about how to do the best pilot you can, but take the pressure off. Again, don't do a formal thing if you don't have to right away. Get your grounding with a pilot program.

Dom Mas: Oh, I love that so much. That is the number one advice I give to everybody. Like just take a little bit of the pressure off, give yourself space to explore, understand what works, what doesn't, and then you can truly dive into what makes sense for your organization and not be tied to, oh, we have to do this and we have to get it right. I love that so much.

Katherine Lord: And I'd say what allows that freedom, sort of thinking about a tree blowing in the wind, that's the pilot. Like you can kind of go all over the place, it's a little bit free flow, but what will ground you, what will root you? I have to say this, and I believe this, is the ICF core competencies. Yeah, if you root your program and what you're doing in the competencies that are tried and true, it's going to give you a leg up. It's going to give you a foundation to explore and play, which is what you want.

Dom Mas: Yeah. Ah, love it. Love it. Thank you so much. This is great. And I think we have a pretty good frame on what it means to be building a coaching culture. And now I want to come back to you because that's where we started. So I want to come back to you. You've been doing all this incredible work, bringing people together intentionally in community. You've been supporting organizations to grow their coaching cultures, to connect with each other. What's been the shift for you personally? Well, how have you grown since you've started this work?

Katherine Lord: I appreciate that question. And it's twofold because when I stepped into this role, I stepped into two worlds. I stepped into which are connected. So I stepped into my job working with these organizations, but I also stepped into coaching, into the world of coaching.
And very quickly, I got my 60 hours of initial coach training. I'm an ACC candidate. I'm working toward that. So from that side of things, of just being exposed and now immersed in coaching, I truly believe coaching can change the world. I didn't know it existed.

So in almost two years, I've gone from didn't know it was a thing to no, this is the thing. And I feel very passionate about utilizing coaching in different ways and integrating coaching into other helping professions and honestly into any profession. And also the democratization of coaching and the access of coaching. There's that social work heart, access and equity. Because I believe it is so powerful.

The other piece is my absolute joy and the respect I feel and admiration for the people who are doing this work in organizations. I get to work with 70 or so internal coaching program leaders working at companies that are really, really big and doing really, really important things for the world. And the fact that I get to be six degrees away in any way to that work is pretty profound. You're more than

Dom Mas: six degrees, but I'm like one degree away. Yeah. So it kind of, you know, one of our organizational members is AstraZeneca, and they're a pharmaceutical company that are really creating medicine to save lives. And we work with other healthcare organizations and technology companies that are impacting lives. And to think that I get to talk and support the coaches that are supporting the scientists that are creating those medicines, it sort of blows my mind that that's happening. And I'm also so grateful it's happening and just, again, honored to be part of that ecosystem.
And I'm grateful that you are a part of that ecosystem because I know, I know, I say this truly, and I hope that you hear it. I believe that what you bring to these organizations is incredibly powerful. Your kindness, your desire to support, your enthusiasm about building and making sure that everyone feels that they have everything they need so that they can coach, so that the work can be done and the medicines can be created. I hope that you know the ripple effect of the work that you're doing, and I'm grateful for it. So thank you.

Katherine Lord: Thank you. Well, this road has also brought me to you, Dom. So I'm very great. That's one way my life has changed, is that you're now in it.

Dom Mas: Well, thank you so much, Katherine. So, so delightful to have you with us. Thank you for your generosity, for sharing your experiences, for helping us understand better what it means to build a coaching culture and really setting the tone for the rest of this podcast.
Listeners, if you would like to connect with Katherine, her details will be in the show notes. We can probably include some information about the assessment as well, Katherine, if that makes sense. But thanks everyone for joining us today.

Remember to follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube at groupcoachinghq. And remember to subscribe to our mailing list for updates and upcoming events. Until next time, have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you so much.

Katherine Lord: Thanks, Dom.

Group Coaching HQ: Thanks so much for joining us today. Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube at groupcoachinghq. And remember to subscribe to our mailing list for updates and upcoming events. You can find all of the information and links in the show notes. The Coaching in Organizations podcast is brought to you by groupcoachinghq and is produced and edited by Mark Pagán.

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