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Coaching is the cultural process in which leaders give motivational feedback in order to maintain and improve performance. The purpose of coaching is to maximize employee strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Coaching also helps leaders by maintaining their focus on goals, developing resiliency, and improving their interpersonal skills and abilities. Being able to coach employees inside your culture is an important part of the leadership skill set. Below is a list of guidelines you can use as you develop your coaching skills.
GUIDELINES TO DEVELOP YOUR COACHING SKILLS
1. Develop A Supportive Working Relationship: There has been a great deal of research demonstrating that the most important contributing factor to employee success and retention is the relationship with their direct manager. A leader’s primary role is to run interference, remove stumbling blocks, and improve employee performance through feedback and coaching.
2. Offer Praise And Recognition: Praise and recognition for performance in the direction of the goal motivates employees to maintain and increase their performance. This point cannot be overemphasized.
3. Avoid Blame And Embarrassment: The coaching objective is to develop employee knowledge, skills, and abilities. There is never a need to point out a mistake which the employee already realizes or counsel an employee in public.
4. Focus on The Action, Not The Person: Coaching strives to achieve a desired action or behavior. To focus on the person would be placing blame and creating embarrassment. For example:
- Situation: The employee arrives late for a meeting, again.
- Focus on Person: “You are always late for meetings; why can’t you be on time like the rest of us?”
- Focus on Behavior: “This is the second time in a row that you are late for our meeting. The group needs your input right from the start of the meeting.”
5. Use Self-Assessment: Criticism leads to defensive behavior, lack of listening, dislike of the manager, and feeling bad about oneself. Self-assessment creates a different experience.
- Situation: The employee has been making many more errors lately
- Criticism: “You haven’t been working up to par lately. Get on the ball.”
- Self-Assessment: “How would you assess the amount of errors you have been making this week?”
Coaching is a necessary skill for leaders to develop to create a strong coaching culture. However, depending on the skill set of the leader and the relationship with the manager being coached, there are times when an external coach may be required. Nonetheless, external coaches are best used only after internal coaching has been attempted and did not lead to success. Below is an additional list of tactical guidelines leaders can use to develop a culture of coaching.
GUIDELINES TO DEVELOP A CULTURE OF COACHING
1. Give Specific And Descriptive Feedback: Specific feedback should be used to avoid confusion regarding which particular behavior needs to be changed. Descriptive feedback can be based on facts or inferences. Facts can be observed and proven, inferences can not.
A concrete example: You just saw a supervisor reprimand one of his/her direct reports in a public setting. You would pull that supervisor aside (preferably in his/her office or your office) and let them know that you just observed them give a reprimand in public (descriptive).
2. Give Coaching Feedback: There will be times you will want to offer coaching feedback without self-assessment. It is important to always respond positively to negative behavior and negative outcomes. The best way to do this is to sell the benefits of the positive (desired) behavior rather than pointing out the negative outcomes.
Using the same example from above, you would:
- Apply Coaching Feedback: When you reprimand in public (specific), you will likely get less (not more) collaboration in the future (descriptive).
3. Provide Modeling And Training: A good leader leads by example. If employees see the manager doing things in an effective manner, they will tend to do things in the same way (policies limit behavior; culture drives behavior). Failing to train or coach employees is failing to lead.
Using the same example from above and after giving the coaching feedback, you would:
- Apply Modeling And Training: “This is precisely why we are having this discussion in an office and not on the open floor.”
4. Make Feedback Timely, But Flexible: Feedback should be given as soon as possible after the behavior has been observed. For example, if you just saw a supervisor reprimand in public, you would want to give that supervisor feedback as soon as possible after you saw them give the reprimand to his/her direct report. Flexibility comes into play when you don’t have time to offer thorough coaching (you are rushing to another meeting) or when the situation is emotionally charged (you recently had a tense exchange with the supervisor).
5. Don’t Criticize: Once you criticize, one of four things usually happens:
- People become defensive, justify their behavior, or blame it on someone or something else
- People don’t listen to constructive feedback
- People are embarrassed and feel bad about themselves
- People begin to dislike the task or job, and the critic
I hope these guidelines are helpful to you in the many opportunities that may arise for you to use them. Next week, I will write about fostering another kind of work culture. Until then, keep cultivating your culture!