Coaching Requires Action

Coaching requires activities. If we do not plan activities what we tend to do as managers and leaders is resort to providing feedback. What do with tend to gravitate to? Constructive feedback. Feedback alone is not inspiring. It's not motivating. It's not fun to always receive, especially when it's just constructive. If we do not facilitate activities, such as teaching sessions where we make people quantify their knowledge or practice sessions where people practice a particular skill, employees will not arbitrarily do this on their own. Without these planned activities what will we tend to do? We will resort to feedback. Again, what type of feedback? Constructive or corrective feedback. This will wear down an employee psychologically, and ultimately prompt them to leave the organization.

Let's take the example of a customer service agent who needs to up-sell and cross-sell. One of things that a manager could do is use a knowledge based activity. This could be as simple as, teach me the steps that you will use, specifically to up-sell and cross-sell, so I don't make assumptions of what you know to do, which I think might be unfair to you. This is an example of using something called throwing yourself on the sword. The reason we do this is when you ask somebody to teach it it could certainly come off the wrong way, so we want to be respectful. This puts the ownership on the coach as to why its being asked.

On the other hand we could ask the agent to actually practice. One of the best things that we can do as leaders is to play both roles and open it up for a mutual conversation of how both practice sessions went. This will lead to greater participation and facilitation of a positive mentality, especially associated with practice.

Now, if you think this doesn't resonate with you let's take the example of practice and let's us a little bit of humor. When was the last time an employee came into your office and told you that their skill set was low and they needed to practice, but they had been doing so on their own? Obviously, this is quite rare, if even reality. Employees, when they practice or teach things, are more likely to own what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. If we leave it to chance we, ultimately, are always taking a chance.

Coaching is an art form in its one we need to continue to perfect knowing we never really perfect it. There are great organizations out there such as the international coaching Federation And the international coaching Association.We need to continue to explore expand the availability of coaching. One of the things that we talk a lot about in coaching our questions and certainly the ability to give feedback. I think one of the greatest advances we could make is in the facilitation of activities and actions that actually serve more of a value to the coaching process than just feedback.

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