Attend a corporate leadership course, and you’ll learn that a company culture that advocates coaching, mentoring, and continuous learning leads to higher productivity, morale, and business results. However, even when the company culture effectively integrates a culture of coaching into its human resources department and training programs, the results often don’t trickle down all the way through the organization.
The bottleneck often occurs at the departmental level, but you can make sure that doesn’t happen in your brand marketing team. Take the initiative to cultivate a coaching culture in your brand marketing team, and you can turn your department into a high performing team.
A new report from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, Creating a Coaching Culture, found that only 23% of respondents to the study’s research survey stated that their company develops a coaching culture to a high or very high extent. The report recommends four things that you need to implement to turn your team into one that fosters a coaching culture for improved results:
- Coaching should be everyone’s job responsibility.
- Managers should be held accountable for actively providing coaching to their team members and subordinates.
- An executive must lead by example and promote the coaching culture.
- Coaching should be used to transfer knowledge in a positive manner.
When you promote a coaching culture in your brand marketing department, employees won’t just be more motivated—they’ll also be more supportive of the brand they’re marketing on a daily basis. Remember, your employees are your most powerful brand advocates, so creating a company culture that represents the brand promise internally is extremely important. Coaching is one more way to connect employees to the brand in a way that will give your company a sustainable competitive advantage.
A brand marketing team that leverages continuous learning and coaching can evolve into a high performing team and can achieve great success. It’s also a more positive working environment for everyone. As a result, you’ll be able to attract and retain the best talent to your brand marketing team.
Does your brand marketing team foster a coaching culture? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
Image: Philosophygeek license CC BY-SA 2.0
Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.
She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
