Into the WILD: Creating a Coaching Culture at the Workplace

Here is a company staffed by animals from many species-different from other companies-but they tended to keep to their own kind. This diversity worked against them as inherent dysfunctional behaviour meant that departments tended to work in silos, unwilling to share or inform others. This is a corporate jungle filled with distrust, where blaming others and finger-pointing were the norm, and where some animals were fearful of others, especially those with fiery tempers and unreasonable demands.

This was a company in desperate need of a new direction.

As fortune would have it, a crisis paves the way for the senior management team to start a journey of self-reflection and build a culture that leverages on diversity to thrive in the coming years.

Written in two parts, The WILD Company fable in the first section recounts the situation in the company and how a change in culture allows for coaching conversations to take root and flourish. The characters in the fable are like the people we encounter at the workplace; or we may even see ourselves as one of them too. Their story is one that we see happening around us every day. But it is also a story of hope-that a company's transformation from a toxic culture to a coaching culture is possible with the right approach.