Manager As Coach

As a leader, why use Coaching techniques?

Businesses who are seeking to create an empowering culture are finding multiple benefits through training their managers in the use of coaching techniques. In fact, coaching has been found to be a consistent factor to improve empowerment whether it is related to front-line managers, middle managers, or senior level managers.

Managers who take the quick fix approach with their staff and simply want to solve immediate problems, barking orders, compared to leaders who coach their team members to become problem-solvers will never create an empowering culture. Their leadership will also quickly hit a ceiling toward their success.

The Gallup organisation conducted a large research project and discovered that the most significant factor contributing to high employee retention rates, healthy customer satisfaction levels, increased bottom line results and productivity levels were the direct relationships managers had with their staff. Managers who learn how to better engage with their staff through quality coaching techniques see improved performance in their place of work.

Research has shown that managers, in general, believe that the use of coaching techniques as a part of their leadership style would bring greater workplace benefits. Furthermore, managers who had been trained in coaching techniques and persisted at utilizing them over a six-month period, noted that they were worth the effort to learn and implement. It permanently changed their leadership and communication approach after seeing the impact on their direct reports.

Different Coaching Approaches for Managers

When implementing coaching approaches within the workplace, there are two typical paradigms, the formal and the informal.?

The informal is also known as corridor coaching, where the manager uses short, targeted conversations with their staff to collaboratively problem-solve and engage the employee to a greater level in their work. A mind-shift needs to occur here on the part of the manager believing that much of the needed resources to address workplace issues can be drawn out of the employee.?

As a manager increases their coaching skills of being able to quickly ask the right reflective and open-ended questions, the employee is drawn into a constructive conversation which enables them to engage in workplace challenges. If an employee reaches the end of their resources on a particular issue, and it is insufficient to address the situation, then the manager can explore with the employee where and how they may find what they need, offering their full support. Although this can take more of the manager’s time initially, in the long run employees are more equipped, empowered, engaged in their work, productive, and retained longer in the job.

The formal approach can be used with a monthly, fortnightly, or weekly scheduled meeting. The frequency of meetings depends on several variables.?For example, a newly appointed employee may need a significant amount of support in the initial stages and then lessening the frequency of sessions as they increase their competency levels. Other reasons to consider frequency of coaching sessions are the level of difficulty of the role they are in; the level of influence their role has on the organisation; and the type of change being sought in the coaching. The more managers learn to utilize coaching in formal ways, the more they will intuitively understand the frequency of coaching sessions needed.

Areas of focus in workplace coaching

In general terms there are three types of foci sought in a typical workplace coaching relationship. There is developmental, transitional, and remedial.?

Developmental:

This area of workplace coaching seeks to increase an employee’s competency levels.?There are generally two areas of focus within developmental coaching. There are hard skills and soft skills.?Hard skills encompass the technical skills required by an organisation in delivering their required products and services. Soft skills are more behavioural in nature, where the employee increases in their emotional intelligence, which contribute to improved interpersonal capacity becoming a better team player and delivering better customer service.

Technical skills coaching is utilized to increase competency levels, so that the technical capability of the organisation is at a high standard. Much of this type of coaching boarders into apprenticing, where the more experienced technician passes on their knowledge and wisdom gained through being involved in the same type of technical activities, often for many years.

Hard skills coaching tends to be more instructional and is concerned with passing on necessary competencies. This type of coaching contains a significant amount of reviewing. The manager, sits down with the employee after implementing new knowledge in a particular setting and asks, "How did you think it went?" "What did you do well?"?"What needs tweaking?" "What would you do differently next time, and why?"

Soft skills (or emotional intelligence) coaching is invaluable to creating effective leaders, teams, reducing unnecessary conflict, improving lines of communication, better feedback responses, and creating an overall climate and culture that is positive. To create an excellent organisation everyone needs to be developed in these areas. Generally, the higher one proceeds up the ladder of leadership responsibility, spending more time dealing with and working through people, their soft skills, or lack of, exert a significant amount of impact upon organisational outcomes.

Therefore, senior leadership coaching tends to focus more on their inner world. By the time leaders get to the top they generally know what to do but allow their inner world to hinder their success. All of us have our triggers that set us off in certain circumstances, hence if we can discover what pushes our buttons and reprogram our responses to them our behaviours can change significantly.?

These types of shifts affect our intrapersonal relationship with conflict, communication, collaboration, accountability, motivation, stress, innovation, and many other underlying factors. Good coaching will dig into these areas and bring transformation to the inner world. In my coaching of senior leaders, I personally use assessments that can accurately measure all these areas, making it easier to leverage the coaching transform in the best areas. ?

Transitional:

This area of coaching is looking to support an employee who is taking on a new role – often a promotion - within the organisation and needs to adjust to new challenges.?It is easy to misunderstand the nature of transition. It is also easy to misinterpret the experience of an employee going through transition. Often organisational changes can be made by leaders where employees’ roles are changed, and a leader may think all is sorted. But there is a whole inner world within each employee that is transitioning to the changes made. ??

When change occurs, people adapt to those changes at different rates. Some people never adapt and leave. People take different amounts of time to emotionally catch up with the external changes taking place. Furthermore, role transitions inherently carry with them adjustments in skills, relationships, communication processes, responsibility levels and increased stress levels. A manager who has ever been through such change, needs to tap into their empathy to become a valuable ally for an employee going through a similar journey.

It is during these changes that the direct manager has a perfect opportunity to check in with each employee at a one-to-one level. Since transitioning is an individual experience, coaching is the perfect modality to use. It not only brings to the surface areas that can be brainstormed together, but it demonstrates empathy and appreciation toward each employee. Managers can ask simple questions like, “How are you managing the changes?” “What are you struggling with the most?” “What do you need?” “How could what is happening be seen in a more positive light?”

Remedial:

Remedial coaching is often sought where an employee is displaying some behavioural problems, and all informal attempts of remedying them have failed. Sadly, these situations are often a product caused by a manager’s inability to deal with early poor performance. If poor performance has been left unchecked, it is unlikely that the permissive manager in charge will be able to deliver the remedial coaching.

This type of coaching would need to be handled by a trained senior manager or an external professional coach, because it entails the most difficult type of coaching. However, many experienced professional coaches will be reluctant to take on such an intervention, judging that the organisation has already written them off, and the coaching intervention is merely a last-ditch effort or a means of letting them go. ?

Some external professional coaches specialise in this area and coaching has shown that it is highly likely to succeed if there are several conditions met before initiating such an intervention.?There would need to be a genuine desire of support from the organisation’s leadership for the person involved, as ascertained by conducting several interviews. The leaders would need to have an element of patience where change of this order is likely to happen over several months.

The employee would need to be on board with a desire to change and develop. These interventions are usually at a senior level, where the employee has significant capabilities in other areas that the organisation doesn’t want to lose. If in reading this article, you would like to know more, contact me and I can discuss the structured process with you.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that leaders competently using coaching techniques with their staff will see powerful results. The challenge is to first get the training and then to stick with using the techniques over at least a six-month period until it becomes a part of your leadership style. Ironically, the best way to achieve sticking to a quality coaching process for six months is through being coached.

I have had the privilege of doing just that with many leaders and have seen great success through it.?Research shows that once a leader sticks with the process for at least six months they won't go back, and they won't regret the effort. If you were to make this choice then you will become a much more?versatile?leader, enabling you to lead others through a various number of different experiences, retaining more employees, increasing productivity, increasing bottom-line results and seeing greater customer satisfaction.

If you would like to connect and chat with me about anything to do with coaching, or talent management of staff, I'd love to hear from you. I don't mind assisting people on getting clarity on what they need.