When we think of business coaching, we tend to think of an individual-based approach. Yet in order to have the biggest impact on both the person and the organization, coaching needs to take the larger team into account, as well. “When you deploy coaching at scale to individuals, and don't necessarily have a common framework to drive alignment on organizational goals, you end up coaching people in silos,” said Will Foussier, CEO and co-founder of the talent-management platform AceUp, who spoke in a workshop presentation at From Day One’s November virtual conference on upskilling, coaching, and recognition.

The result of the silo effect is that team members will learn skills that will advance them, but they may act individually, possibly in dissonance with the interests of their peers and the organization. The conflicts that ensue can “increase frustration, and increase turnover,” Foussier said. Without that framework of common values, a company can miss a lot of opportunities to ensure that the outcome of coaching is more than the sum of its parts.

In his workshop, Foussier spoke about the corporate urgency around upskilling and reskilling, the need for systemic coaching to drive organizational change, and the way to build lasting organizational leadership capabilities. Among the highlights:

A Fresh Way of Thinking About Skills Needed Today

In surveys in recent years, a vast majority of corporate leaders have said that reskilling and upskilling, especially when it comes to teaching leadership skills, represent the No. 1 management priority. Traditionally, business skills are divided into two types: “There are what we call technical skills, which often relates to the functional expertise of individuals, and there are the people skills, which relates to the behaviors that can foster collaboration and innovation in an organization,” Foussier said.

However, the terms commonly used to differentiate them–hard skills vs. soft skills–are becoming outmoded. “The reason we're changing the semantic is because in today's economy, hard skills are considered soft in the sense that they're constantly becoming obsolete. And on the other end, the soft skills are really hard to build into your organizational structure. They are difficult to build, they take time to build, and they are the most critical for success in today's world of work.”

In an IBM survey of more than 5,000 executives in which they were asked to rank the most important skills needed, the top four were behavioral, especially in the realm of flexibility and adaptability, Foussier said. This perception does not only come from the top, though. Studies have shown that younger workers playing a critical role in challenging the status quo–Generation Z and Millennials–have a particular interest in developing their emotional behavior.

Those skills could address a critical need. “We've been talking a lot this year about not only empathy, but compassion, and the need for compassionate leadership as a way to understand what people are going through, to meet them where they are, and to help them cope with the disruption they are facing today,” Foussier said. “We need a type of leadership that is not necessarily stepping into problem solving, but can really empower others and help them coach others through the challenges they find at work.”

The Promise of Coaching at Scale

“If individuals don’t grow together, they are likely to grow apart,” said Foussier, quoting AceUp advisor Peter Hawkins, a management professor, author, and leading thinker on the topic of systemic coaching. This approach means that you need to appreciate the interdependent relationships between stakeholders when coaching an individual, Foussier said. “If you coach an individual without necessarily understanding how people evolve in the organization, you're not going to have the right impact for that individual. And so coaching all the stakeholders, being mindful of their interdependent relationships, is actually a necessary way to provide more value to each individual as well.”

“One-on-one coaching is absolutely essential, and extremely impactful,” Foussier continued.  “But the most valuable solution when it comes to upskilling and reskilling, according to employees, is group coaching.” When all these coaching elements are combined with coordination by senior leadership on the company’s change-management initiatives, “you can actually turn around cultural transformation remarkably rapidly.”

Yet benefits also accrue over time, research shows. “When individuals have been coached for a long time, and with alignment on organizational goals, you can see that they tend to convert negative interaction around them into positive interaction. You can see also that they are increasing the level of well-being of people around them. This is how we can move from supporting individuals to supporting the team, and the transformation of the organization.”

Building Leadership Capabilities in the Whole Organization

While a top-down approach to systemic change is necessary, since senior leadership has to identify the development goals of the organization, it’s not enough, Foussier said. “We complete it with a bottom-up approach, where leadership-development and behavioral-profile assessments are provided to every employee so that we can understand how they define their development needs and goals, how they define their most pressing challenges at work, and how they perceive the development needs of their team and the organization. This is going to help drive alignment at all levels, among all stakeholders, about the vision for change.”

The purpose of this dynamic approach is to be “really zooming in on leadership and management competency gaps at all levels of the company,” Foussier said. Another benefit is inclusive leadership development, which can be amplified by diversity among the coaches. “It’s absolutely essential for us to have a very diverse profile of coaches in our network. And it is a point of pride that more than 40% of the coaches in our network are people of color.”

Foussier concluded with a quote often attributed to the 20^th Century management guru Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” While both are needed, Foussier said, “you may not have the best strategy to win in your industry, but if you have the most effective, impactful company culture, you will always win. It’s your most impactful lever.” A company that’s showing the strength of culture right now, he said, is Microsoft, where CEO Satya Nadella has infused “a growth mindset” as the most important leadership principle at the company, one that reaches all levels of the organization.

Editor's Note: From Day One thanks our partner for this workshop, AceUp.

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.