Creating a Coaching Culture in Your Organisation

June 17, 2026

By Rachel Varrilly Gierula PCC

“As Director of Workplace Coaching, I have the privilege of working with organisations that want to create environments where people can grow, perform and thrive. Coaching has the power to transform not only individual development, but also the way people lead, collaborate and learn across an organisation.

Many organisations aspire to build a coaching culture. Developing internal coaching capability, strengthening coaching skills in leaders and creating opportunities for quality coaching conversations are all valuable steps forward. However, lasting impact comes when coaching is supported by the wider systems, behaviours and structures that shape everyday experience.

Rachel and I have spent many hours exploring what this looks like in practice. In this article, she shares thoughtful insights into how organisations can move beyond individual initiatives and take a more holistic approach to embedding coaching.

If you’re considering how coaching can play a greater role in your organisation’s future, I hope this article offers both inspiration and practical reflection for the journey ahead. And if you’d like to explore what a coaching culture could look like in your organisation, Rachel and I would love to start that conversation with you.”

Kelly Wood, Director of Workplace Coaching

Over the past few years as a tutor on the Barefoot Coaching flagship programme, I’ve met many delegates who’ve been asked to “learn coaching and come back and build a coaching culture”. It’s always said with good intent. And yet, each time, I find myself thinking the same thing: that’s a big ask for one person.

Because a coaching culture isn’t created by sending a handful of people on a workshop, or by introducing 1:1 coaching for senior leaders. Those things can absolutely help, but they are activities, not the culture itself. A coaching culture is something broader and deeper. For me, it’s best understood through the simplest definition of culture: how we do things around here.

So if an organisation wants to build a coaching culture, the real question is not “How do we add coaching?” It’s “How do we want people to experience leadership, development and support here?” What should colleagues notice, feel and talk about if coaching is genuinely part of the way the organisation operates?

That’s why the work has to begin with people. Decision-makers, colleagues, and often customers or service users too. Before designing solutions, it’s important to understand the organisation as it is today, and the future it wants to grow into. In our work, that starts with a fact find. We explore three simple questions: what is the future vision, what is the current reality, and what is known to be in or out of scope?

Alongside that, we look at five themes drawn from a systemic view of coaching in organisations: goals, roles and relationships, development activities, processes and evaluation.

This matters because what works in one organisation may not work in another. A non-prescriptive approach is essential. Rather than arriving with a fixed model, we look at what already exists, where the gaps are, and what needs to be prioritised. Sometimes that means external coaching. Sometimes it means leader-as-coach development. Sometimes it means policy design, supervision for internal coaches, better access routes, or stronger evaluation measures. Usually, it means a combination.

The coaching culture framework developed by David Clutterbuck and David Megginson (https://clutterbuck-cmi.com/briefings/creating-a-coaching-culture/) is useful here. They describe four stages in the development of a coaching culture: nascent, tactical, strategic and embedded. That helps clients understand not only where they are now, but what it may realistically take to move forward over time. Building a coaching culture is rarely a quick win; it’s a staged, cumulative process.

It also requires more than good intentions from L&D or HR. If coaching is going to be part of how things are done, then systems need to support it. Leaders need to model it. Processes need to account for it. Measures need to evidence it. As Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular (https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-leader-as-coach) argue in their Harvard Business Review article, the role of the manager is increasingly becoming that of a coach — not because it’s fashionable, but because command-and-control leadership no longer serves organisations well in complexity and change.

So what is a coaching culture? For me, it’s when coaching — formally and informally — is authentically embedded in leadership, values, colleague experience and organisational design. It’s purposeful, it’s measurable, and it feels coherent. In the end, it’s simply this: coaching becomes part of the way we do things around here.

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