Understand The Employee You Are Coaching??

To coach effectively, you must thoroughly understand the employee you are trying to develop. Elite Sports Coach Jamie Taylor believes that you need to strive to understand the employee's psychology and the pre-existing competencies they bring to the table.?

He shares two tips to help you understand the employee you’re trying to coach and build an effective coaching plan:

Step 1: Understand the employee's psycho-behavioural make-up

In the world of sports, Jamie explains that coaches need to understand the athlete's psycho behavioural skills to truly understand their potential and best coach them towards it.

Psycho behavioural traits are understanding why an individual is how they are. For example, if they are a quieter individual, what is it that causes them to be like that.

This knowledge enables you to create the right environments and coaching styles that play into that person’s unique make-up.

This will help you craft a plan of action to help elevate their capabilities/skills and tap into their potential.

Step 2: Planning your Employees’ Development

You should be proactively planning the development of your employees. This could be to help them further master the stuff they are good at or you could create a development plan to help them fix their weaknesses.

Development Plans must be gradual in terms of progression towards that particular aim. They should be challenging enough to engage your employee but not so complex you disengage them.

And at the end of the day, regardless of sports or business we are all performers and are constantly trying to develop ourselves. Therefore, unless you have a deep understanding of that employee and how they are internally built, it’s difficult for you to offer them a coaching plan that actually works for them and enable them to maximise their potential.

Identify your Role in Coaching

The idea of not needing to be the master of the skill before coaching it isn’t wrong, but you need to understand what role you are playing to coach effectively.?

• To effectively coach a skill, you have to know the topic. After all, if you can’t teach at least a facet of the topic, then it’s a waste of time. You cannot teach what you don’t know. So if you are in a position where an employee needs to be taught something, connect them with an expert who can.
• You can always broaden your knowledge based on what you need to impart and teach. This should be something that you actively do in order to better equip your employees to execute and obtain higher performance.
• However, you can still add value as a coach when you are not the master of a topic. You can encourage lateral thinking and more creative patterns of thought for your employees.
• For example, if you can’t teach your employee something extremely technical, then you could help them think about problems related to the issues and challenge them to think of different solutions through your line of questioning and guiding their thoughts. It still contributes towards developing them without you having to teach them.

Of course, the most important thing is to understand that your role as a coach will depend on the employee's needs and you should always start by identifying how and in which area you can help your employees. It is also your responsibility to go and seek appropriate help from the right people if you don’t know something and your employees need to be taught it.

Head to the link to watch the whole Masterclass, download Jamie's frameworks and engage with him in our community of leaders:

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