Anna Czerny reports from the CIPD annual coaching conference in London A coaching programme at Dixons’ parent company, designed to change its perceived “paternalistic and aggressive culture”, went ahead without the permission of its senior executives.
But Karen McKeever, reward and recognitions manager at DSG International, who was involved in launching the programme, said it was necessary to take such a risk to achieve the desired result.
“We did not seek permission from the senior executives because they breathed the old culture,” said McKeever. “We wanted to move away from a command-and-control style of work to a culture that really realised talent in the organisation,” she added.
McKeever and her colleagues in HR used their existing budget to introduce a coaching course last year that would fit the Dixons Group culture, based on neuro-linguistic programming – the study of the structure of human experience.
She and five colleagues were trained as coaches’ coaches who then trained 80 other managers of the top 150 in the organisation to be coaches; these in turn offered their help to other employees in the firm.
The aim of the programme was to improve people’s performance without explicitly telling them what to do, but rather helping them to figure it out by themselves – to “unleash their potential”, according to McKeever.
McKeever stressed that it was important for the programme to be practical.
“We had to change the perception that coaching was ‘soft’. We also wanted to make sure it fitted with the sales culture and was something that people could use in the field on a day-to-day basis,” she said.
She added that the programme had helped to reduce labour turnover, but the real difference was in the organisation’s culture. “For us it’s not about the financial results – it’s about the language people use in the halls,” said McKeever. And senior executives have since given their full support to the programme.