Coaching

Coaching is one of the most important aspects of being a people manager. Coaching provides you tools to shape someones career, create multiplier effect and scale yourself up. This is part 3 of the leadership series (summarizing The Manager's handbook), and you can find the last article on Feedback here.

A few core pieces of individual coaching -

• Building the relationship with the individual
• Understanding their motivations
• Helping create clarity where they are in their journey
• Guiding them and removing roadblocks
• Teaching patience

Zone of Genius

Understanding where someone is at and placing them in the right spot is the first step before we can start providing meaningful coaching and feedback. Detailed reading here, but I will cover two important ones.

• Zone of Incompetence - Misalignment between people and tasks is where there is a lack of talent or skills. The teammate should be retrained, redistributed in the org, or asked to find a better match outside the company.
• Zone of Genius - When talents, skills, and strengths are all aligned, we are in our Zone of Genius. These are the things that you are uniquely good at in the world, and that you love to do. This is where you add most value. This is where you should be driving your team to spending most, if not all, of their time.

One on Ones

This is inarguably the single most important meeting for your relationship with your report and best point of leverage to provide clarity and make changes. We should take this seriously and have a rather well defined structure. Make the meeting about them. Ask questions rather than making statements.

Why do we have one-on-ones?

• Build and foster relationships - Connect with another human being. Develop trust.
• Provide and receive feedback, information sharing - It should happen in both directions and often. Make them feel safe, and they will share the information that is critical for you to know.
• Accountability Again this should happen in both directions to continue building trust and mutual respect. Track commitments seriously and create a culture of upholding them, unless there are extenuating circumstances.
• Inspiration and career goal - Inspire your report, empower them and make them see what does success look like.

Organization, Setup and Structure for one-on-ones

• If you cannot make it, PLEASE let your report know as soon as you can and set it up for another time.
• Ideally you should be meeting your direct reports once a week for 30 mins. To maintain a healthy balance and do justice to your reports, you should have around 7 direct reports. You can stack up one-on-ones in a single day or can spread them throughout the week per your style.
• Use a running doc (Google docs, Notion, Asana etc) to pre-seed agenda items (from both), capture notes and commitments.
• Be prepared - You want to make the most out of your one-on-one and add value to your direct report's time/week. If there is something heads-up worthy, message them ahead of time. No one likes big surprises and no preparation.
• Format - There is no one size fits all format but here are a few things I like to touch on (not usually in this order) - Connect and catch up with them on things outside of work, celebrate personal or team wins, Ask for high level pointers or top of minds, probe with questions as needed and offer help, review OKRs and hold them accountable, provide any pass downs, provide/seek feedback, create intention for next week, excite them and document any follow up commitments.

Professional Development

• Help your teammates develop clarity around their motivations, goals, skills and gaps. It's the knowing why and where to go rather than how to get there.
• Once you help them develop self awareness, guide them to next steps, help them get right projects and the right role, even if it is outside of your organization. You need to help them get the right environment for growth. Set people up for long term growth.
• Growth does not have to be just at work - Help people cultivate multiple areas of growth and guide them to achieve it at and outside of their job for wholesome development.
• Growth does not always mean vertical progression - Growth means they have broader and deeper skills sets. It means they are developing skills that will help them in their next play, which could be growing vertically, founding a startup, or helping the team become effective. The vertical progression is simply a side effect of personal and professional growth.
• Set long term goals - Anything meaningful and substantial takes time. Help your reports see the bigger picture, help them create a structure to monitor progress and create accountability, and help them understand the value of patience. Ask them a lot of questions - What do they want out of their career, what things interest and motivate them, what is holding them back and so on.
• Mentorship - An often underutilized resource. You are a mentor to your team, but should also advocate to find external mentors, either outside of your org or even outside the company. You want your team to get diverse perspectives and a system of guidance and accountability,
• Taking responsibility of your own growth - Ultimately growth lies in the hands of the employees. The managers role is to probe, provide clarity, guide, remove roadblocks, empower and enable them. Lastly, a manager is an employee too, so they ought to apply this to themselves as much as they will preach it.