Are you looking for ways to scale the benefits of coaching throughout your organization? The Hudson Institute of Coaching is excited to be hosting a panel exploring how the building blocks of coaching can be integrated into day-to-day work to generate individual and organizational change.

Everyday Development: A New Take on Scaling Coaching will include leaders from HP, Boston Consulting Group, and Netflix and take place on Thursday, November 14th at 11 am PST/2 pm EST.

Sign up for the webinar.

Before the panel, Hudson Institute of Coaching CEO Michael Hudson shares a few thoughts on the importance of everyday development and how it can transform your organization. 

What is everyday development?

Everyday development is a challenge to common ways of thinking about how coaching is deployed in an organization, one aimed at making it possible for every employee to have access to meaningful development. It’s about equipping employees — with skills derived from coaching — to use small moments in daily work to help one another grow.

We often hear from managers stressed about the pressure to coach. How can they be coaches all the time when they have to perform and deliver? That’s the beauty of everyday development; they don’t have to take detours into coaching. Instead, they simply have to bring a new mindset and skills into the work they are already doing. In fact, leaders engaged with everyday development will find they have more capacity and time, creating more space for them to shift into coaching in the moments when it’s needed. 

Everyday development encourages us to question why we’re so busy, and helps us tackle the root causes that lead work to pile up. For example, many managers are overwhelmed because they’re in firefighting mode, telling employees how to fix problems. What might it look like if employees felt more confident navigating issues on their own? Everyday development is one way to work toward greater employee ownership. 

Everyday development pushes us to recognize that helping employees grow isn’t something that happens outside our normal workflows; a new responsibility to add on top of existing ones. Rather, it’s about taking advantage of naturally occurring opportunities in day-to-day interactions. When many people across the organization learn how to seize these small opportunities, it leads to pretty big changes.

Could you share some examples of “naturally occurring opportunities” for everyday development? 

Entry points are abundant in our daily work — they are regular interactions that are typically underutilized, not for lack of effort, but because of a mindset and skills gap. Weekly one-on-ones. A group meeting. An informal conversation in the hall. But I’ll focus on one kind of opportunity that will be familiar to most of us: giving feedback. 

Managers and leaders are constantly giving feedback — from notes on an active task to long-term strategic guidance. Sometimes an employee comes to the manager for help. Other times the manager notices an area for improvement. In both cases, the default is to fix and tell. This is something we’ve been talking about for a long time at Hudson. Fixing and telling can occasionally resolve the immediate issue, but it guarantees that when an employee encounters a future problem, they’ll come back to you to solve it. That takes up your time. And it takes away an opportunity for growth.

Everyday development is as simple as switching a directive to a question. So the next time an employee asks for help, instead of saying, “Here’s what you should do,” you can ask, “What are the barriers getting in your way?” or “What do you think we should do next?” That’s it! That question then becomes an invitation for the employee to share what’s going on — and for the manager to really listen. 

What are some challenges to creating a culture of everyday development? What skills do managers need to learn that they don’t have already? 

Everyday development is a simple, straightforward way to integrate coaching and development into day-to-day work. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy! It’s actually really hard, because it requires us to go against the instinct of just getting stuff done, recognize those entry points I was talking about earlier, and step back to evaluate what we can change to improve the way we’re working. 

At Hudson, we help organizations fostereveryday development in a few different ways. Most importantly, we focus on growing leaders’ human skills: listening, empathy, presence. There isn’t one magic way to teach these skills. But there are practices we can put in place that, bit by bit, help us grow. 

For example, to listen better, you should find a quiet place to be in a conversation where you won’t be interrupted, practice the words “tell me more,” and avoid analogizing to your own experiences, no matter how tempting. To be more empathetic, you might tell a colleague “That sounds really hard” without jumping to solutions. Or share about your own difficulties to invite vulnerability from others. 

Why is everyday development worth the investment? How does it lead to organizational change? 

There are a ton of stats I can share with you on the crisis of leadership and employee engagement that companies are facing today. Only half of employees believe their boss cares about their well-being. According to Gallup, employee engagement is at a decade-long low. 

At the same time, there are hopeful indicators. Gallup estimates that managers with basic coaching skills see 72% lower turnover in their teams. And research shows that employees who feel heard are 4.6 times more likely to say they feel empowered to perform their best. 

If there’s one thing I want people to remember, it’s that big-picture organizational change requires buy-in from the top but ultimately depends on bottom-up processes of culture change. A system transforms when individuals do: as more people take advantage of natural opportunities for everyday development, the entire company, like a large ship, can begin to shift course. 

To learn more about Everyday Development: A New Take on Scaling Coaching, sign up for our panel here. For more insights on development and growth, follow Michael Hudson on LinkedIn.