People Development

Coaching

Coaching Training Session

External and internal business trends mean that the older style command and control approach style of management is no longer going to allow a company to grow profitably.

Managers are now expected to act not just as managers, but leaders, coaches and facilitators as well. At the same time they are being expected to handle a wider span of responsibilities.

Managers need to help the individuals working with them to establish clear goals, develop new skills and abilities and function more effectively when working in teams

This means a need to develop both your own skills and those of the people with whom you interact.

For both you and the employee the challenge is how to learn, grow and develop.

Some specific benefits of effective coaching

Allows greater delegation of jobs and responsibilities.
Makes your own role as supervisor much easier when employees have built their own skill levels.
Increases the productivity of individuals as they become clearer on goals and how to achieve them.
Allows for more effective team working as a culture of coaching becomes ingrained in the organisation.
Can allow you to be promoted if you have trained up competent replacements.
Will increase employee motivation and initiative.
Builds your reputation as a people developer.
If you are not doing it the company down the road may well be.
Can be a great deal of fun and the source of a lot of satisfaction.

With all these benefits why does coaching not happen all the time?

There are two major barriers

Lack of the appropriate skills.
Lack of real commitment to coaching and allowing day to day problems to take precedence.

How not to coach

It can be helpful to look at coaching by first looking at some examples of where coaching skills were poor or non existent.

We all have examples of where we have been on the receiving end of poor coaching.

The bad teacher when we were at school.
Perhaps the first supervisor we had when we were still very new in the job.

What were the key characteristics that you most remember about those experiences?

Similarly what do you most remember when you have been on the receiving end of effective coaching?

There are three different approaches in coaching

Seeking to improve substandard performance.
Seeking to maintain standard performance by keeping the employee motivated and satisfied to continue to work and meet the standards.
Developmental coaching to exceed standard performance and develop new skills.

If the goal is to achieve more through enhancing performance from individuals then all three areas need to be worked upon.

The bulk of coaching in focused on the third category but the other two can offer really significant benefits and you as the manager need to be very clear in your own mind which category an individual you are coaching fits into.

Lets look at the first two areas before focusing on the third.

1- Improving sub standard performance

The first question to ask here is: Does the employee know that their performance is sub standard?

In many cases the only feedback that the employee has received in the past is silence from the boss mingled with the odd specific criticism that fails to address the underlying basic causes

There can be an unwillingness to tackle poor performance which means it can continue.

Tackling poor performance will need to be specific as to what needs to be changed and how the situation can be improved and to have a programme agreed with the employee as to what will then count as success.

2 - Maintaining adequate performance

The opportunity here is two fold:

To continue to motivate the employee by various recognition tools
To recognize that in addition to being a competent employee this type of employee can have an enormous wealth of knowledge and background which may perhaps be of use elsewhere- e.g. in helping to train others in some of the technical skills that the competent employee has already shown they have.

Such an employee may - or may not - also be a candidate to develop and acquire new skills.

We all have examples of an employee who is felt to have reached their ceiling but turns out to have both the desire and ability to progress further.

A key coaching skill to develop over time is to ensure that you can spot these employees and work with them on the third developmental stage.

Before you begin coaching any individual you MUST be clear into which category they fall today. That can change over time but you must be clear on what it is today.

3 - Developmental coaching

Coaching for development is more dynamic as the goals keep changing and it also requires reinforcement from the culture and style of the whole organisation. Without the active support and recognition of the rest of the organisation individual efforts at coaching for development are unlikely to deliver their full potential.

A health check for the organisation can be helpful and should cover the following:

Does the unit have a culture of continuous improvement and is it ready to keep adapting to improve the way it operates?
How strong is teamwork and is openness encouraged ?
Is there clear knowledge of what standards need to be used to assess employees and their skills and competencies?
Are there the opportunities to develop new skills ?
Do the managers have the needed coaching skills?

How would you rate yourselves in each of these areas? Will any of them act as a barrier to effective coaching?

To coach effectively you ideally need to develop six key skills

All six are obvious when stated and we would all claim to be able to do them but the actual steady continual application of the skills is going to require a strong and fixed commitment from each of you.

Effective coaching requires knowing when and how to use the following six key skills.

1 - Listening

Listening skills are not a strong point of most managers. Hurried conversations, interruptions of daily problems and trying to cope with several things at the same time all make listening an area subject to many pitfalls. The vast majority of people prefer to talk rather than listen.

In addition many of us listen only to the verbal and ignore signs such as body posture and other non verbal indications.

How can we maximise the ways to listen better?

2 - Observing

Coaches must be skilled in looking and listening for signs that the employee needs help or can take more responsibility and act more on their own.

3 - Analyzing

A good coach must always try and go to the basic causes when there is a change in performance- either positive or negative. E.g. if performance has declined is that due to personal issues, a lack of skills , a lack in motivation, the absence of a colleague leading to greater workload or what?

The key here is to get to the basic underlying causes and not focus on the symptom- in this case a slippage in performance.

4 - Interviewing

Coaches must learn how to gain important information about skills, values and ambitions from an employee without leaving the employee feeling hostile or defensive.

The techniques here are similar to being a good interviewer:

Do your preparation thoroughly before the meeting so you have goals in mind and know which questions which you will be looking to answer.
Vary your questions from open ended to specific as required.
As a general rule of thumb limit your talking to a max of 25% of the conversation.

5 - Contracting

The goal here is to articulate and spell out the details of the expectations and commitments that you and the employee are entering into.

Too often manager and employee leave the same meeting with a very different reading of what has been agreed as the next actions and who is responsible for what etc.

Make it very clear who is to do what with whom using what resources and how the process will be review and judged etc.

6 - Giving feedback

This is the last and perhaps the key tool in coaching skills. Feedback can lead to greatly improved performance when handled correctly and can also be very demotivating if handled poorly.

Feedback must be specific when examples will help and must be clearly focused on helping the employee - not relieving the possible frustrations/anger of the manager for a job done badly.

The goal in any feedback is to achieve better performance from the employee.

The focus must be on setting an environment which will cause the employee to do something positive as a result- even if that positive is simply to cease doing something that is detracting form their performance- e.g. always arriving late for work.

Summary

We can all remember the times when we were praised for a job well done or achieved something new for the first time.

Good coaching is aiming to grow the organisation by growing the individuals that make up that organisation. Perhaps the ultimate test of your success at coaching skills is when your employees are eligible for internal promotion or are sought as employees by other companies.

Coaching in discussion is not difficult- the challenge is in applying it on a day to day basis.

Two basic rules will make the likelihood of success very much higher

Knowing in your own mind which one of the three areas where you can use coaching you are dealing with on each occasion.
Using the six key skills on a daily basis. You can try and assess yourself as to how well and how often you are using them as you go forward from this session.

Good Luck.