Coaching - Highest Performance

All managers must strive to perfect. You can demonstrate, you can show, and you can threaten individuals into striving for a higher performance, but unless you can coach the members of your team, you will be ineffective as a manager.

 Your responsibility is to determine what it will take to get a team member to be a better team member, as well as a contributing member of the organizational community.

Next, you need to help the individual incorporate your knowledge and expertise into his or her skill sets in a complementary manner.

 There are three terms that often get confused. For the purposes of this book, let’s establish some definitions:

 Coaching: A series of steps or activities designed to improve the performance of a salesperson or any other employee.

Counseling: A series of steps or activities designed to correct a problem affecting a salesperson or any other employee.

Mentoring: A series of steps or activities designed to guide and help a person’s career growth—usually not in a direct report relationship that exists between a sales manager and the sales team members.

 I will not discuss the third approach. It is certainly worthy of review, but that will be reserved for another time and another post. Your interest is in coaching and counseling and

in making sure that you are getting the highest performance possible out of each and every person on your team.

 Think back on your successful career to date.

Who coached you and what did you like and dislike about certain coaching activities? At the very beginning of this post, I told the story of how my friend coached me on my relationship with the ‘‘wagon pullers.’’

I’m fortunate that he didn’t stop there but continued to coach me on business skills (and life) for many years after that. I can recall times when I just wanted to walk away from a difficult customer, but he coached me to face and resolve the problems.

Other times, he coached me to take the time to get to know my customers as people.

What did I like about his coaching?

My friend’s patience. My friend was one of the most patient people I have ever known. He had a long-term perspective of solutions and a building block approach to getting there.

 Other leaders who have coached me demonstrated such qualities as being great listeners (and adjusting their coaching to what they heard) and being open to ways of achieving results that were different from the ones they might have taken. These people also showed respect for knowledge and diverse experience, and authentic integrity.

Other leaders who I didn’t find as satisfying tended to fluctuate too much, to be inconsistent, have hidden and secretive agendas, and create an air of dishonesty and deceit.

 There are many forms of coaching, but as the S?o Paulo police officer said to the tourist who asked how to get into Santos Futebol Clube as soccer player -> practice, practice, practice.