In this solo episode, Charlie reflects on what it is about coaching that organisations appreciate, drawing from his experience as a coach, trainer, and supervisor. He explores why organisations choose coaching over other similar interventions, offering insights and reflections to help coaches strengthen their confidence, grow their practice, and stay connected to their values.
Main Topics Discussed in the Episode:
In this conversation, Charlie reflects on the role of coaching to support organisational development and change, offering valuable lessons that can help you grow in your own coaching journey.
We also talk about:
[Main Point 1] Helping colleagues access coaching
[Main Point 2] Coaching for both individual and organisational development
[Main Point 3] Organisations who train an in-house coaching team
[Main Point 4] And how coaching gets used around the organisation
Each story shared brings real-life insights that both new and experienced coaches can connect with and learn from.
Useful Links From This Episode:
Transcript:
Charlie Warshawski (00:02.67)
Greetings fellow coaches. How are you doing? I hope you’re well. I hope you’re a good week and I hope that you’re having some enjoyable coaching moments. You’ve been doing much coaching this week? I do hope so. I do hope you’ve had lots of opportunities. I am on a Friday afternoon reflecting on the coaching that I’ve seen and that I’ve observed this week. I’ve seen about a dozen coaching sessions, either recordings that coaches in training have sent or live coaches.
during our live webinar programs. And I’ve really been struck by the amount of care, the amount of tension, the amount of focus, and really the amount of courage that coaches have been bringing to these conversations. It’s joyful, joyful to see. I’m very lucky being able to see so much coaching. What about you all? What has been some coaching moments for you this week? Did you have a good coaching client experience? Have you been doing a bit of coaching study? Have you been talking?
to fellow coaches about your coaching. What have you been doing? I hope it’s going well. Hope you’re enjoying it. In this first series, we’re thinking all about why people love coaching. Clearly, it’s an important thing for me, and I think it’s also quite an important thing generally for our relatively new sector to think about the positive, to think about why people love coaching. Last time, I talked quite a lot about the client, the coachee, and today,
we’re going to talk about the organization and why is organizations love coaching. organizations are not the only people who get coaching sorted out. Lots of people come to coaching themselves. Lots of people choose to have their own coach and fund themselves. But lots of people get involved in coaching in one way or another because of the place that they work at. So I’m going to take this into
into two halves. The first half, we will talk about organizations who organize coaching and who make sure that their people have access to coaching. Give you a few examples and we’ll share a few stories. And in the second half, we’re going to talk about organizations who choose to train some of their people to be coaches and to see what that’s like. And I think there’s lots of interesting stories and examples and experiences. So,
Charlie Warshawski (02:26.008)
You ready to go? Friday afternoon, I’ve got a cup of tea here with me and love to talk about coaching and organizations.
Charlie Warshawski (02:38.368)
It’s all evolved over the last 20 years, probably from organizations doing nothing for, terms of organizing coaching to doing absolutely loads. We see programs driven by big companies, HR departments, making sure everyone gets a coach or gets access to coaching. We’ve seen it in.
smaller organizations where there is maybe an internal coach or a coach or a couple of coaches who turn up regularly to offer coaching. And we’ve seen it somewhere in the middle where coaching is there and there are some people who driving the coaching agenda and it’s getting some movement, but maybe not as much as they would like. What seems to be quite common is that there is an understanding that coaching
can be one of the ways of helping people grow and develop. And it can be one of the ways that the organization can continue to grow and develop. It’s very interesting to read. A lot of our work is coach training, and we do coaching qualifications. And part of one of the qualifications, assignment where coaches have to write about what alternatives to coaching
are used in organizations to develop their people. People write about training, they write about shadowing, they write about conferences, they write about 360s, they write about the appraisal system. Often these things, they find some good things about them, but they also find some not so good things about them. Coaching does seem to stand out above all of these because they are tailored, individual,
ways of supporting people and helping people come up with their own answers. So it feels to me much more of a done with the person rather than a done to the person that some of those are the models that I cited. So organizations, and I am being a bit generic here, but organizations are able to look at coaching and say, coaching can help bring our people on. They can help our people be better at their job and
Charlie Warshawski (04:55.105)
hopefully be happier as well. And it’s those two twin agendas, I think, that’s going on at the moment, certainly in the 2020s. The idea that organizations have a bit of a responsibility for helping with the wellbeing, but also they’ve clearly got the organizational responsibility for whatever the output and the results and the efficiency that they have to achieve. And coaching can do both. Coaching can help people feel better about themselves, can help people
be in a better place, more grounded, more rounded, less stressed. So you’ve got all of those personal benefits. But also coaching can help people perform better, do their job better. Not like machines, know, one of the first coaching books written was called Coaching for Performance. And that always felt a bit like, you know, let’s get more out of our people. But I think it can be done in a much more humane, much more organic way.
much more about helping people identify their strengths, identify their areas to improve and to work on those things. So organizations can look at coaching and say, this can be really useful. This can be really useful to help our people change, progress, develop without feeling judged, without feeling criticized, without feeling devalued or underappreciated.
So that’s probably the first starting point is that organizations can invest in coaching because they can see the possibility of it making a difference for the individual and for the organization.
Charlie Warshawski (06:45.965)
I think the next reason that organizations like coaching is that nowadays they can see it can be a well-organized and a well-planned approach. When I first started coaching in 2007, there was definitely this idea that if you befriended someone in an organization, whether they were your client or they were the person who would pay for learning and development,
that if you got yourself in there, you would likely get some coaching work. And no one really asked you about it. No one really talks to you about it. You would crack on and it would last as long as it would last. And then at some point in time, someone would say, no, we can’t afford coaching anymore. And we’d stop. So it felt very…
Unsatisfactory, but also a bit confusing. Probably some organizations still do it a bit like that, but I think that there’s a much more organized and a much more efficient way that lots of organizations are coming to. So organizations can, for example, have a roster of coaches. They can say, we only take on coaches who have this level of qualification, or perhaps,
coaches who are experienced in our sector or in this area. And that means that the organization has a bit of management of the whole process and that’s good. And that’s really important. It also moves away from the sort of early days, wild west of anything goes and trying to move away from that. The next thing that I think organizations really like within the structure is that they can have some control in the whole process. So not the old fashioned thing of
Maybe the line manager giving the coach a bit of a secret briefing. I need you to work, get this bloke to work on this thing because he or she is a bit rubbish, but more like a transparent process where there will be a mature conversation between the line manager or the sponsor and the coach and the client and an agreement on what they’re going to work on. So the organization feels like, we’ve had a bit of input. We’ve said when we’ve shared what we’d really like to see our colleague work on.
Charlie Warshawski (09:00.727)
But then it is a protected and it’s a private relationship. And I think there’s nothing more wonderful than a manager or a line manager or an owner saying to someone, here’s your coach. We’re going to work with that coach. I’m not going to get involved. I’m not going to interfere. You know, you’ve heard my initial thoughts, but now it’s up to you. I’ll leave you guys to crack on and good luck. And I hope it goes really well. Well, think that’s, it’s a really caring thing to do. So the organization knows that they’re giving something to the person.
be able to work on and work with. And it’s better than Friday afternoon yoga classes or free pizzas or going home early or any of those things. It’s something real and it’s something really tangible. And you can see probably from when I talk about the sponsor or the line manager having a little bit of input that suddenly we can relate coaching to the organizational out.
Because again, I think that’s a bit of a worry. People think, well, if I give someone in my team a coach to work with, they’re just going to talk about their, I don’t know, their health and fitness plan at home or their cash to 5K or their marriage or their kids living home or something else like that. Clearly personal thoughts do creep in to workplace coaching, but workplace coaching needs to be predominantly focused around work.
Perhaps a personal context within the work, but nevertheless, work, think it’s really important.
We’re getting a bit of a picture, aren’t we? We’re getting to see that this is not some random thing. This is not some fluffy thing that organizations organize, and it’s not something that’s spiraling away out of their control. It’s really not. There’s one more thing that I want to mention is that organizations can use coaching in a positive way. I think one of the perhaps the biggest change we’ve seen in the last 10 years is
Charlie Warshawski (11:02.925)
There’s been a bit of move away from organizations saying, well, we need to give coaching to our underachievers or to the people who are struggling or the people who are bit lost. To actually coaching is quite democratic. It could be for anyone and including our high performers. I remember seeing, and I’m sure a lot of you have seen that, that little grid, that model, that situational leadership model. You know, the what is sometimes called the skill or will matrix.
And it says, if you are low skill, low will, no motivation, that you need direct management. if you are high, I can never remember them all because it’s that useless, right? High skill, low will, what you probably need is some mentoring. And if you are high skill, high will, so in the top right hand quadrant, you don’t need anything. You just need delegation.
You know, and coaching sits in that bottom right hand quadrant of high, high, high world, but low skill. The problem with that is why shouldn’t high achievers have some coaching? What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with letting people have coaching when they are doing well? Maybe they do even better rather than just saying, they’re fine. Those guys, they’re fine. Leave them alone. You know, he or she can just crack on. That doesn’t seem right or fair.
And organizations have gotten onto this. I think of a few examples. are periodically videos go around the coaching community from someone who is the CEO of something or who’s a leader of something. And they say, well, I have a coach. I love having a coach. It’s great having a coach. And we should have a coach. think of, I work with organizations in education who do recruitment of head teachers and other school leaders.
And what they do is that they organize this big old recruitment process to get a new head teacher appointed. And at the end of that appointment process, that head teacher is offered coaching so that they can start being coached when they take on this job. Well, think about it, a head teacher who’s just gone through a recruitment process is going to be good at their job. They’re going to do their job well, they? They’ve already been acknowledged as being that person. So we’re saying coachingsupports that positive aspect as well.
So I hope I’m painting a good picture in this first half of why organizations might really engage in and really like coaching. I’ve mapped out a little bit about the benefits. I’ve thought about the organization. I’ve thought about the impact that organizations can see for them, but also for their people from engaging in coaching. We’ll take a break now, but perhaps as we go into a break, have a little think about what you’ve seen.
from whichever chair you’re sitting in, whether you work with organizations, you’re inside an organization, you help organizations organize coaching or something else. What do you notice about why organizations love their coaching? Have a cup of tea and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk in the second half about why organizations train coaches. See you in a little moment.
Charlie Warshawski (15:35.48)
Welcome back. hope you had a bit of a break, bit of a leg stretch. And now we’re ready to think about organizations and why they train coaches. So this is the other side of the coin, I think, how and why organizations love coaching. This is probably the main area of my experience for the last 10 years or so, I’ve been working with organizations, helping them to train people to be coaches. And I think organizations
love this possibly even more than when they organise coaching for their people. Why? Because a, they get trained coaches within their organisation and b, then they can automatically offer coaching to their people. So sometimes we work with an organisation that sends someone, of course, you one person. One person is going to train and learn to be a coach. They might work in HR, they might work in learning and development generally, they might be
a middle leader or a senior leader, but they either, because of the organization or because of their own enthusiasm, have decided to become a coach. So there they are. There they are. They’re ready. They’re keen. They want to be coaches. Or we might work at the right, the other end of the scale when an organization says, everyone, everyone at a certain level is going to be a coach. I just finished some work with a wonderful primary school in
Harrow, a big shout out to the head, Pam Verde. She did her coach training. She earned her ILM level seven coaching qualification during lockdown. And after that, she said, right, all of the middle leaders. And we trained all of the middle leaders and the assistant, deputy head, everyone now in that school at that level and above is a coach. They all earned their ILM level three. And what a wonderful thing.
So if you work in that school, if you work in that school in Harrow, you always have the opportunity to have some coaching. Maybe your line manager is a coach, so you get lots of coaching style conversations to support you. Or maybe they’re not, but you can ask to have some coaching. You could see a coach once a month or once every six weeks, and you get to work on the coaching issues. So that’s like instant creating a coaching culture.
Charlie Warshawski (18:01.925)
maybe not instant. It took them a little while to get the qualification, but you get the point, don’t you? So we’ve got four organizations, anything from the, let’s train one individual to let’s train loads of people. And of course, if you train loads of people, then there’s a next step, which is around getting the organization of the coaching going on and making sure there’s a good flow system. That’s really important. So
What do we see? Well, I work with lots of sponsors and I’m thinking about organizations we work with like the Salvation Army, like EuroStar and like Ofcom. And what I see there is that the person who champions a coaching really runs with it. know, they help to select the people who are going to be trained to be coaches. They advertise it out there. They put it out there. They might sometimes nominate people. They hand pick people.
And then they keep in touch with us all through the process. And what happens is people learn to be coaches and then they are out there coaching. They’re out there coaching either because they find people to coach within the organization or because the organization organizes coaching for them. So suddenly what you’ve got is an organization where loads of coaching is happening.
And you’ve got people getting all of the benefits of coaching that we talked about in the first half of this episode and also in the last episode. All these people becoming more efficient, having their wellbeing taken care of, feeling well listened to, feeling well nurtured. So we’ve got all of that going on. But you’ve also then got all these trained coaches knocking around and these people who are trained coaches and they are able to offer coaching at the drop of a hat.
Even if you don’t drop a hat, they can still offer coaching. And what’s really interesting is that often, often, often people say, it’s not just when I’m coaching actually, it’s also in many other conversations. I’m using my coaching skills and I love that. I’m listening more. I’m not rushing in. I’m not offering solutions. I’m managing my meetings in better ways. We work with lots of school leaders, lots of head teachers and
It’s probably one of the most common things we hear in training is that head teachers say, I’m different in my meetings. I’m different in those parent conversations when normally I would tell them A and B and C and D and then ask them if they’ve got any questions. I start the other way around. say, yeah, what would you like to share? You know, what thoughts have you got? What are your ideas? And I get them to talk and they say it diffuses tense situations. It really helps. And it really helps people feel and be heard.
So that’s what we’ve got. We’ve got people who are qualified coaches now within the organisation and they are contributing to the organisation as well as growing themselves as leaders. So imagine this, I know we’re talking about the organisation, but imagine you go for a job and you ask about what support, what nurture, what wellbeing support there is in this organisation for you and they say, well,
What we’ve got, we’ve got a whole group of people that are trained as coaches. We have a coaching platform. You can book in for a coaching session. It’s not one of those out there part of the employee assistance program things. It’s right here. It’s right present. It’d be people you would know. People who will support you and you can access coaching as often as you like. Imagine how you’d feel. I’d be delighted. I’d be happy as Larry. You know, the idea that
that we can get coaching as part of our day job. How wonderful.
So we are seeing more and more organizations getting in touch and asking to train people and asking them to train one or two or three. And it’s often a snowball effect. It’s often like what I just described with Pam and her school in Harrow. One person trains and then it follows along. Another example I can think of is a school in Solihull and a shout out to Mark Penny.
Charlie Warshawski (22:22.061)
Mark trained to be a coach again during lockdown and, and then he just started sending people. He sent one for a course, then he sent another three or four. And over the years he’s kept on sending more people and more people. And I spoke to him recently, you will be able to hear the podcast episode with him in series five or six, I think. And he talks about how much coaching is going on in his school. What they do is when you get promoted to be a middle leader,
you will get a coach automatically. So they’re running a middle-learner training program supplemented by one-to-one coaching. It’s a wonderful example. It’s a great example of how coaching can be used as part of a whole big learning and development package.
So suddenly we have gone from a place where coaching 20 years ago was described as a bit out there, a bit wild west, a bit random, a bit chaotic. That certainly was my experience when I started. So now it’s organized. It can be systematic. It can be structured. Yes, it needs expertise. Of course, I think it needs expertise in the organization to organize it. And it needs expertise and professionalism from the coaches to make sure that they’re responding.
the correct way. But an organization in 2025 who’s interested in coaching, they can have coaches available to coach their people. They can have coaches available to support both the well-being and the goals of the aspirations, the targets of the organization. And they could also have coaches. They can have coaches available in the organization, coaches
working on their own professional development by becoming coaches and being able to support the organization with good and great coaching skills. If you’d ask me to choose one of those two, I’d say that’s not fair. Please don’t make me do that. But okay, as you’ve asked, I’d probably say it’s better for organization to train coaches. It’s cheaper in the long run. You develop an internal capacity, don’t you? You’ve got coaches within the organization. Those coaches can maybe
Charlie Warshawski (24:35.117)
as they advance, train other people to be coaches. You can organize hundreds and thousands of hours of coaching to take place because you’ve got trained coaches. So I would always favor that one. And I think it’s a really good and important, helpful approach.
So why make this episode? It’s coaches, probably, who are going to be listening to this more than organizations. I think because it’s really good for us as coaches to think about this. You may be in front of a sponsor in an organization. You may be trying to persuade them or encourage them to engage in your coaching. You would like to have some coaching clients from that organization. So being able to answer some of these questions, if you’re asked, well, what?
Why should we bother with coaching? Why shouldn’t we just send everyone on a training course or just have a really robust appraisal system? You can offer some of these sorts. You can offer some of these insights. You can be able to say coaching benefits an organization because, and then cite a few examples. But please don’t just take my examples. Have your own examples. And as we come to the end of this episode, have a little think about what are your examples of what you’ve seen?
for organizations loving, benefiting from engaging and appreciating coaching. Because your examples will be strong, your examples will be powerful and will be helpful. So I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this and I you enjoyed thinking about the impact of coaching in organizations. Next time, I’m gonna talk about why I think coaches love coaching. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? They’re coaches, so of course they love coaching.
but it’s really good to maybe put it on the table. perhaps as you drift off to the rest of your week, have a think about that and we can talk about that next time. Thank you so much for coming along. I’ve really enjoyed talking about this and I hope you enjoyed listening to it too. Have a good week, enjoy thinking about and enjoy doing your coaching. Happy coaching. See you next time.
About Charlie:
I’m Charlie Warshawski, a UK based coach, coach trainer and supervisor. Coaching has been my thing since 2007 and I’ve been keen to start this podcast, to help fellow coaches navigate the difficulties of running a coaching business or practice. Most of my coaching takes place in education and I love coaching school leaders. And most of the supervision I do is with coaches who are starting their coaching practice.
Since 2019 I’ve been supporting new and experienced coaches with resources to help them grow their business – our free The Sustainable Coach programme is available to all coaches, and over 200 coaches have accessed these resources.
Away from coaching, four children, three pets, a poor table tennis and cycling schedule and a thirst for language learning all keep me busy.
Love Your Coaching Resources:
- Visit our website
- Learn more about our courses and coaching qualifications
- Contacts: charlie@loveyourcoaching.com | hello@loveyourcoaching.com| 01306 264026 | 0774 8515189
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