Managers and leaders are critical to the success of a business, and so are effective coaching skills. Consistent coaching helps with employee onboarding and retention, performance improvement, skill improvement, and knowledge transfer. On top of these benefits, coaching others is an effective method for reinforcing and transferring learning.
While there are many important leadership skills and competencies, coaching is central to improving the performance of entire teams.
Also, there’s proper workplace coaching. What is it you may ask?
Workplace coaching is the process of equipping people with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities they need to fully develop themselves to be effective in their commitment to themselves, the company, and their work.
A “designed alliance” focused on developing an individual to become their “best self” and to contribute their “best fit” and talents.
Good coaching can be easy to spot, but hard to emulate.
First, you need to meet your team members where they’re at. Coaching isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Some people will need a lot more handholding than others, depending on where they’re at in their job role and overall career.
To cope with the constraints on changes in the business environment, it is necessary to develop new knowledge and skills as well as the ability to apply integrated ways of thinking in a short period of time. Change demands from organizations the ability to manage change, to develop and apply new knowledge and skills.
Before we get to our seven coaching tips, here’s a quick look at how you can align coaching conversations with individual employees’ needs.
Promotes creativity
Coaching promotes creativity, breakthrough performance, and resilience, giving organizations a competitive edge and an effective way to flow and operate within an environment of continuous change.
Successful organizations like Hewlett Packard, IBM, MCI, and others have recognized that managers must be able to coach their employees and each other, and have included coaching in their management/leadership development.
There are a variety of practices, including coaching, that facilitate people providing them support and accelerating the process of setting and achieving work-related goals.
Coaching has been identified by these organizations as a critical leadership and management competency.
Recognize what’s going well
Coaching well requires a balance of criticism and praise. If your coaching conversations are completely focused on what’s not working and what the employee has to do to change, that’s not motivating, it’s demoralizing.
Coaching is becoming increasingly popular in today’s business environment more and more organizations are using coaching as a means of improving performance, developing skills and capability, facilitating leadership development, as well as career managing.
Your recognition of the things your employee is doing well can be a springboard into how they can build from that to improve. We’re not talking about the compliment sandwich here, though, because that coaching technique often devolves into shallow praise that comes off as insincere.
Compliment fairly and distributed to the team
Giving compliments that you don’t actually mean can have a worse effect than not giving any at all, so take the time to think about specific things that are going well, and let your employees know that you see and appreciate them!
Another aspect of this is how the employee likes to be recognized. This is a good question to ask them from the start of your relationship – does frequent recognition help them stay motivated, or is every once in a while sufficient? Do they prefer recognition to be given publicly or privately? The last thing you want to do is embarrass someone when you’re trying to be a good coach!
Executive coaching is the ultimate in tailored leadership development. You work one-on-one with a world-class Performance Coach on your goals and challenges, your personal strengths, and any areas for development. Together you create a strong and trusting partnership that enables you to improve and sustain your performance.
Performance Consultants pioneered coaching in business over 40 years ago and continue to lead the field globally. We partner with companies and senior individuals looking for executive coaching that is transformational and that impacts the bottom line.
Coaching has never been more necessary than now and in the future
Moving forwards change will be the norm and individual resilience and performance will be crucial to team and organizational success. Coaching leverages individual strengths and abilities for maximum performance.
Employees who are coached to perform rather than managed to perform are more committed to and invested in the outcomes of their work and the achievement of organizational goals.
Successful organizations have also discovered that ongoing training of the workforce is necessary to remain competitive. However, without coaching, training loses its effectiveness rapidly and often fails to achieve the lasting behavioral changes needed. While training is an “event”, coaching is a process, which is a valuable next step to training to ensure that the new knowledge imparted, actually becomes learned behavior.
Key Takeaway
Creating a safe space to do this work was essential and the coaches were skilled at building the contract that allowed everyone to agree on how they would work together. At first, the coaches held individuals to account when their behaviors strayed from what was agreed, as they inevitably did. In time the team took on this role for themselves and began to challenge and speak up when they felt another team member was not ‘living’ the agreed behaviors.
As a result, content analysis and comparative analysis have revealed that coaching is defined as a regular, synergetic, learning and development, goal-oriented process. Facilitation is a primary aim of coaching. Coaching is more beneficial for people who provide decisions.
Achieved results and personal growth is considered as the key expected coaching outcomes. Coaching provides greater goal clarity, better alignment with the roles in the organization. However, the possible threats and challenges, such as stereotype and misunderstanding, lack of systematic approach to coaching engagements as well as its alignment with organizational change needs, have also been detected.
The journey was not always straightforward and working at the deeper level at times required a sharp intake of breath and a leap into cold water.