Every business professional worth their salt understands how important it is to produce a positive company culture that stresses harmony and productivity. Similarly, any business owner who competently runs their own company understands just how imperative proper worker training and coaching is. Nonetheless, far too many businesses are failing when it comes to combining these two things to create a coaching culture which helps your workers achieve their full potential.

Here’s how you can create a coaching culture with success, and what missteps you’ll need to avoid if you don’t want to frighten off your best workers.

You have to make work enjoyable

If you’re trying to create a coaching culture that will help your workers tap into their true potential, then it’s a simple matter of fact that you have to make heading into work enjoyable. This can seem like a herculean task, and it’s certainly impossible to get workers to treat business like it’s entertainment, but making your workspace an inviting place to head towards each morning isn’t quite as impossible as you’d think. True coaching cultures resemble actual athletic teams insofar as everyone involved in the operation wants to be there, is having fun and pushing themselves, and understands that the harsh training they’re undergoing is so that they can do even better when they hit the big leagues.

Rather than rushing into this head-first and making a fool of yourself, however, you need to embrace a coaching culture slowly and steadily. You should begin by embracing the power of mentorship programs, which enable your veteran workers to take amateurs under their wings so that they may learn to fly before leaving the nest. Mentorship programs usually involve some degree of investment – mentors will need to be paid more, after all – but they’re virtually always worth the costs.

You should consider launching a high-impact mentoring program at your business if you’ve yet to already do so. Coaching cultures require competent employees who can reasonably and wisely explain complicated subjects to their colleagues, so if you don’t have an arsenal of well-trained mentors to fall back upon your entire endeavor will fail from the start. Next, you should tirelessly work towards producing a business environment where every worker has an opportunity to gain new skills and climb the corporate ladder if they demonstrate initiative.

Helping your employees achieve more

Any company culture that’s legitimately based around coaching will be highly focused on helping their employees achieve more, as inspiring, leading, and training is what any good coach does. It should thus be clear to see that you need savvy managers if you’re going to get anywhere at all – a team needs not just players, after all, but also coaches and trainers if it wants to win the championship game. Taking your managers and morphing them into effective leaders who can churn out other leaders themselves is thus an important part of creating an effective coaching culture.

Study closely the ways you can shepherd your managers into coaches and you’ll be on the pathway to success. Furthermore, consider investing heavily in employee training initiatives that offer to pay for the education or re-skilling of your workers on a contract-basis, as this is a surefire way to bolster their skills and turn them into future leaders. At the end of the day, a coaching culture is all about being welcoming, tolerant of mistakes, and diligent when it comes to learning and doing better next time. If your business focuses on championing these ideals while it provides effective mentors for newcomers, you’ll have established a fantastic coaching culture in no time.