Coaching Cultures Surve1

Coaching Cultures survey. For the purposes of completing an assignment on Coaching in Organisations, I set out to explore the extent to which a coaching culture exists within an informal on-line community (“E-Community”) and in a conventional team (“C-Team”) in a large organisation. By coaching culture I mean “not a culture where everyone has an external coach, but a culture where people coach each other all the time as a natural part of meetings, reviews and one-to-one discussions of all kinds” Hardingham, A. (2004) The Coach’s Coach, Chapter 24 “Building a Coaching Culture”p184 I am a member of both the on-line community and the conventional team. I have inevitably developed my own views about the functioning and effectiveness of both so I conducted surveys amongst my colleagues to check the extent to which my own perspectives are shared. I constructed the survey from the list of characteristics in Downey’s chapter on Effective Teams (2003, p152). The characteristics in lighter italics were omitted as I felt that they were either repetitious, difficult to assess through this medium, potentially ambiguous, or not applicable to an on-line community. •An apparent absence of hierarchy in the relationships •Listening and a desire to understand each other •Robust, challenging conversations •Clear feedback sought and given •The pursuit of 'impossible' goals •Focused activity •An intuitive sense of where each member is and how they are doing •Request and offers of help or support •Flexibility in the roles and a willingness to cover for each other •Creativity, imagination and intuition as part of the toolkit •Team members caring for each other and their well-being •Fun, joy and the simple pleasure of being together •Silence and thoughtfulness before decisions and action •Mutual accountability for the achievement of goals. Interferences include: •Lack of trust in other team members •Fear of ridicule •Fear of being dominated •Pursuit of personal agendas •Need to lead •Lack of clarity about the task or the goals •Pursuit of incongruent goals •Hidden agendas •Not understanding (or distrusting) each other's intentions •No agreed process for working together •An absence of agreed ground rules •Rivalries

I asked participants to describe the extent to which their experience of the team or community matched these characteristics. I selected 13 questions on issues about interpersonal relationships and a further 12 on functions and processes within the team. There was some deliberate overlap of questions. The majority of the questions were selected from Downey’s characteristics of a team functioning free of interference but I also added some aspects of the “interferences” he mentioned. I decided to conduct an on-line survey in order to reassure participants about anonymity and to make it easier to collect responses. Members of the E-Community are scattered around the world, and even communications within the C-Team are difficult because of people’s different work patterns and commitments. I have included some screen shots here and also constructed a rough visual interpretation of the results in order to compare the two groups from the data collected. My methodology in inviting people to participate in the survey was slightly different in each case, reflecting my different experiences of communication within each team. In the case of the E-Community I first sent out a message on Twitter asking for anyone who had been part of that group to complete the survey. Within 5 minutes this message had been “re-Tweeted” One hour after my original Tweet, my first survey response came in. I followed up the broadcast message with direct messages addressed personally to 10 members of the original group with whom I still have some contact from time to time (including the one who had already responded. I chose 11 in total because there are 11 members of the C-Team and wanted comparable results. The 11 were not chosen at random but are people I am still in touch with and had worked with on a group task when we were all part of the on-line community. After 48 hours I had 9 responses out of the 11 requests sent. How I communicated with each group is of interest. Twitter allows messages of only 140 characters. My request was therefore very brief:

(This is an illustration of a Direct Message (complete with typo: I missed out the word “you” in the first line!), in this case sent to Teresa P in Portugal.) Similarly, in constructing the survey for the E-Community, I gave very little introduction or explanation. This reflects my confidence in the relationships I had with the people in this community and the trust I had that they would understand my motives and be willing to help (Downey’s characteristic: “An intuitive sense of where members are”): By contrast, in surveying the C-Team, I was more cautious and more formal. Firstly, as we have no guaranteed broadcast method of communicating I had to use individual emails. I constructed this with great care, being anxious to clarify my motives, the anonymity involved and the reason for the choice of questions.

I could have contacted people before hand to explain the project and why I was doing it, but I wanted to see if this direct “out of the blue” approach would get a reasonable level of response as it had with the E-Community. I was very pleased to receive 7 responses out of 11 within the first 24 hours. After 48 hours I had 8 and after four days I had 10. However, another interesting contrast between the two surveys is that in both cases I expressed my willingness to share the results of the survey. In 6 cases in the E-Community I received messages saying that the survey had been completed and 2 requests to see the results. I received no communication from any member of the C-Team and no requests for the results to be shared with them. I also completed the survey for both teams so the results include my responses, bringing the final totals to 11/12 completed surveys for E-Community and 11/12 for C-Team.

Survey Results: C-Team

E-Community

Interpreting the results In the following diagram I have charted the positive vs. negative responses of each group by totalling the answers given in each category (from strongly disagree to strongly agree). In interpreting the results I adjusted the positive – negative direction of these responses where the question referred to a negative characteristic. (So “strongly agree” that there are rivalries becomes a negative response; whereas “strongly agree” with flexibility of roles is a positive). The red and orange lines refer to the E-Community, the blue and green lines to C-Team responses. The values on the x axis represent the degree of negativity, with -2 as the most negative response, 0 as neutral and 2 as the most positive response. I should add that this is not intended to be a statistical analysis, merely a way of visually representing a broad picture of people’s perceptions. The results demonstrate that the E-Community in general had a far more positive view of its functioning and relationships (189 positive responses) and virtually nothing negative to report (13 negative) responses. By contrast, the C-Team had almost as many negative (97) as positive (116) experiences to report. 80 Number of responses

70

CTeam relationships

60 50

CTeam processes

40

ECom relationships

30 20

ECom processes

10 0 -2

-1

Negative 0

Positive

1

2