My work is centred around two main areas: understanding the science of performance, and looking at how to build high performance cultures. My work on understanding the science of performance involves bringing across recent insights from neuroscience into leadership. I was thrilled to have a write up about this work in Business Week July 2007, following on from the NeuroLeadership Summit.

The lense I look through around building high performance cultures is the concept of a 'coaching culture'. A coaching culture is a place where people have useful sounding boards to help them think and perform at their best, on call when they need them. New recruits are given great tools and support as they come into a business, and people in transition, whether to a new role or leaving the business, have the support they need as well.

Building coaching cultures
In May and June 2008 I delivered a series of one day events across the US about building coaching cultures, with a colleague Chris Coffey. There's a short video below of me talking about these events, that provides a few insights into these ideas.



Building a coaching culture involves integrating the ideas of coaching within an organization. It's a shift from just thinking about coaching as a tool for senior executives, provided by external coaching 'experts'.

Building a coaching culture requires the following:
• Having a clear definition of coaching
• Making direct links to how coaching fits into existing learning and development objectives
• Having a theory base for how and why coaching works
• Measurement and research activities to validate the impact of coaching
• Buy-in from senior leaders, which usually requires an educational program of some sort

With these in place, there tend to be two main tools organizations use to build coaching competencies: short skills programs for lots of managers, and intensive certification programs for smaller numbers of internal coaches. A combination of these two tends to be the best. My organization delivers these kinds of projects worldwide, and I also do personal research into the coaching field overall, to identify trends and gather data about the field.

Here is a list of some of the more recent resources that you might enjoy.

Resources on scaling up coaching

WEBINARS AND AUDIO EVENTS: Check out the one hour webinar I ran for the Conference Board in 2007, on building a coaching culture. It explores the ways that organizations can scale up coaching internally, going into the latest research. There is also a free teleconference event you can download and listen to, click here.

WHITE PAPER: I recently finished a comprehensive 50 page White Paper on internal coaching, which summarizes several key bodies of research on this field and draws on the experience of working on over 100 internal and widescale coaching interventions. Please email me to receive this directly, at davidrock@workplacecoaching.com

CASE STUDY SHOWING 17 to 1 ROI: If you would like a copy of a new case study showing how AIG achieved a return on investment of seventeen times, email me and I will send this to you.

CONFERENCES: The Conference Board (USA) and the CIPD (UK) run the two best events globally on coaching cultures.

If you are interested in learning more about this area please see my commercial website at www.workplacecoaching.com or contact me directly at davidrock@workplacecoaching.com