The Ideal Employee Coaching Model

The ideal employee coaching model is something that is incredibly unique. Often when we think about coaching, we think about coaching an employee to do a particular job. When we coach a salesperson, we want them to sell more. When we coach a customer service person, we want them to provide great service to our clients. When we coach a future leader, we want them to become a great leader. This coaching model can work yet, it can also be extremely focused upon what the organization needs. The ideal coaching model is about three different intertwined attributes that can fuel one another.

First, we must understand what the employee wants. What the employee wants does not mean specifically to the job yet more fundamentally what they want out of life and their career. Recently, I asked four different organizations in four different polls how many people had a list of what the goals and the motivations were for each of their team members out of 45 leaders? I had one person who said yes, I had a few people who said somewhat, and the majority over 85% said NO. That is not a criticism. That is the opportunity. When we find out what somebody wants out of life, what they want out of their career, what a personal or private goal is we now have information that we can use in our coaching conversation, not just for the betterment of that employee, but for the team and the organization.

The second element of the ideal coaching model is what management needs to expect to be blunt. Employees who have a certain job need to do that job successfully with everything that's going on with the pandemic crisis. I do to a certain degree, feel like organizations, many organizations have bent over backwards to assist employees in their anxiety and their mental health. While I applaud this, I also think sometimes we can go too far and forget we also have a job to do. The job is really incumbent upon the employee doing his or her job to their maximum ability.

Third, the ideal coaching model’s third aspect is true teamwork. True teamwork are ideal organizational behaviors of sharing, being a good teammate, applauding one another, seeking feedback to personally develop, providing strength-based feedback, to lift other people up just to name a few.

Now, how do these three aspects work together? Let's take a hypothetical employee by the name of Jane. Let's say Jane someday wants to run her own company and let's say her job at the organization is an accountant. Now the boss of this accountant is probably a hundred percent focused on Jane doing accounting correctly. What if the boss knew that Jane wanted to become a business owner? What if the owner or the manager of Jane could still expect job performance and help Jane pursue her dreams of having her own business? Would the manager be more engaged with Jane to produce more work? One of the most fundamental things we need to do today is to applaud our employee’s individuality. Now, if Jane were being coached to pursue and learn different things of how to start your own company, while being challenged to maintain her job performance specific to her accounting job, what would happen to her teamwork behaviors? Would she become more enjoyable? Would she be a better teammate? Would she learn things about herself where she could share herself with other people? Often, we hire people to do a job and we leave it at that. The job becomes the status quo until a promotion comes up yet, what if we knew what motivated people? What if we helped people who didn't even know their own motivations to seek and find out what those are? Wouldn't that strengthen the organization? Wouldn't that strengthen the boss to employee relationship? Would not that strengthen true teamwork behaviors?

Click here for a Video Overview: https://youtu.be/_iL0gpWF1ng