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Manager Essentials
7
min read
“Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn, rather than teaching them.” - John Whitmore
Employee coaching is the secret tool that high performing organizations use to develop and nurture talent they already have. It supports continuous performance management by not only addressing challenges of today, but also preparing the employees to tackle what comes their way in the future.
In this article we will discuss:
- How to provide coaching to employees at different levels of performance
- 16 tips for managers to use coaching to improve performance
- Top skills for managers to become better coaches
Importance of employee coaching
Before we discuss further about how coaching can be implemented to achieve performance improvement and how managers can support the same, let’s quickly look at a few reasons that illustrate the importance of employee coaching:
On a closer look, you will see that employee coaching not only enhances employee experience leading to greater engagement and retention, but also has direct business impact with better performance, productivity and revenue.
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Identify coaching needs for different levels of employee performance
Before we start with specific employee coaching tips, you need to understand that the same coaching approach may not work for performers across different levels in the organization. There are two sides to this understanding:
- First, coaching will be different for different vertical levels based on tenure and experience within an organization. The same employee coaching framework will not work for a fresher and for someone with 30+ years of work experience.
- Second, coaching for high performers will be different from that for a sub-optimal performer. You can either get this understanding by looking for performance trends manually or use a tool. For example, the Performance Snapshot feature of SuperBeings helps managers with a 9 grid matrix to identify employees at different performance levels based on their performance history over time and their future potential.
Once you have figured out different groups of performers, use this list of tips to support employee coaching at different performance levels:
1. The newbie
- Avoid micromanaging
- Give direction to ensure a culture fit
- Offer constructive feedback
2. The ones who have just started performing
- Encourage desired behavior
- Appreciate a job well done
- Help understand the next level of responsibility
3. The ones performing well
- Help create a career trajectory
- Encourage greater responsibility
- Appreciate efforts and recognize initiative
4. The masters
- Focus on niche coaching
- Help navigate leadership journey
- Create a ripple effect by encouraging second generation coaching
5. The high performers
- Help chart out their high potential professional journey
- Encourage them to anticipate potential challenges and prepare them to deal with them
- Focus on building their leadership skills
- Present them with new challenges to innovate and use creativity
- Don’t let them off the hook because of halo effect
- Understand and expand their core motivation
5. The low performers
- Understand key challenges
- Promote avenues for continuous learning
- Involve them in creating a performance improvement plan
- Encourage them to identify right opportunities for growth
- Provide constructive feedback
- Reward incremental performance improvement
- Read how to deal with poor performers to learn more specific tips for coaching the low performers
16 tips for managers to use employee coaching for performance improvement
When it comes to improving performance, employee coaching can help in many ways. Here are some actionable tips for you to implement easily.
- Ask questions to enable employees to come to solutions on their own, guide the way instead of driving them to the finish line.
- Have some questions ready in advance as an ice breaker to avoid any awkward silence
- Refrain from jumping to solutions if the employee is taking a little time to think, offer a safe space for brainstorming
- Promote open ended questions versus those with binary responses to encourage conversation
- Make your phrasing empowering, instead of using terms like “you should”, say “how would you”
- Try to make each conversation growth focused, instead of spending too much time on reflecting what has happened. Focus on the future
- Focus on professional development, even beyond organizational goals
- Show faith in the employee you are coaching and encourage them to believe in themselves
- Focus on identifying performance problems for the employee and ensure they understand the same
- Collectively with the employee, try to understand the underlying factors that can promote better performance outcomes
- Understand common barriers to performance and categorize them as internal (specific to the employee) or external (like organizational support)
- Reflect on your conversations to analyze when you are asking questions and when providing solutions
- Create an action plan for long term performance goals and areas of improvement
- Be consistent in following up the progress and address challenges that might come along the way
- Offer constructive feedback at every step
- Be open to feedback from the employees on what can be better
5 Must Have Coaching Skills for Managers
To undertake the practices mentioned above, managers need to have a certain set of skills that can enable them to unlock performance for their employees. Following is a list of top skills to hone and some best practices to master the same.
Skill #1: Inquisitiveness
For employee coaching, managers need to move away from providing solutions and towards asking the right questions. The questions should be powerful enough to help the employees think in a growth oriented direction.
How to become inquisitive?
- Ask meaningful questions
- Focus on open ended questions
- Keep your questions with a positive tone — don’t start a question with “don’t you think” or the like phrases
- Have follow up questions from within the conversation
Skill #2: Active listening
While coaching is about providing guidance, it seeks to ensure that guidance and support is offered to the situation of the employee. Hence, active listening is an important skill for managers if they want to become better coaches.
Active listening involves hearing, understanding, reflecting on and responding to what the employee has to say.
How to become an active listener?
- Provide your undivided attention
- Use your facial gestures and body language to indicate you are listening
- Paraphrase and summarize to ensure your listening and understanding was accurate
- Don’t interrupt to force your point of view
- Don’t jump to conclusions
Skill #3: Growth mindset
Managers who seek to excel in employee coaching need to have a growth mindset with a commitment and belief for the development and success of their employees.
How to adopt a growth mindset?
- Align organizational priorities with growth opportunities for the employees
- Encourage employees to see challenges as opportunities
- Help them in mastering the art of reflection and learning
- Empower team members to come up with alternative solutions to the same problems
- Facilitate autonomy and flexibility to innovate and experiment
Skill $4: Empathy
As a coach, managers will be exposed to many sensitivities of an employee that might be holding them back. In such a situation, empathy as a skill is extremely important to create a high level of comfort and confidence.
How to become empathetic?
- Check your unconscious biases
- Be open to new perspectives and experiences
- Connect with your employees on a human and emotional level instead of just transactional
- Be genuinely interested in the employee’s growth
Skill #5: Consistency
Finally, for managers to become a highly effective coach, the skill of consistency needs to be imbibed. The intent is to ensure that your efforts are not limited to a one off instance, rather are sustainable and scalable over time.
How to become consistent?
- Create an action plan with a follow up schedule
- Calendarize your 1:1 meetings with employees you are coaching
- Constantly motivate the employees on their performance
- Don’t be too pushy or over burdening
Wrapping Up
Drawing this article to a close, it is quite clear that employee coaching has incredible potential to skyrocket performance for any organization. However, a few things need to be kept in mind.
- Clearly distinguish between coaching and other activities like managing and feedback
- Have different coaching frameworks and approaches for different levels of performance
- Coaching works in different ways for high and low performing employees
- Managers need to hone specific skills to facilitate effective employee coaching
- Focus on the above mentioned best practices is important to leverage coaching for improving performance
If you are interested in checking out more useful resources on managing employee performance, do check this out
