Coaching – Making Hard Easier

These days it seems as if every business is telling managers to be good coaches. It is the right thing to be emphasizing, but one has to ponder if business leaders really understand what they are asking managers to do. A coach has to be chairman of the board, a regular person, confidant, taskmaster, motivational speaker, public relations expert, and psychologist all at once, and that’s on a good day. The expectation is that the coach is always “on.” Can you imagine addressing the same group of people day after day, meeting after meeting, year after year? Holding their attention is hard enough let alone saying something meaningful.

That’s just the start of the coaching challenge. There are always going to be people problems. One person has a personal problem, another a performance problem and another has a problem but doesn’t even realize a problem exists. That’s the employee side of the equation. The coach also reports to and works beside other managers. These individuals are job talents, but are also card-carrying members of the human race. They bring to their roles and responsibilities hopes, dreams, beliefs, and tendencies that must be respected, leveraged, and sometimes, diplomatically worked around.

The American way is to work hard and long. Everyone puts in many hours of work. This means good morale is a must. Who do you think the chief morale officer is? Of course, it is the coach. Attitude and atmosphere come top down, not employee up.

OK, you get it! Coaching involves doing a lot. It is people science and it is hard. So here are a few fundamentals every manager/coach can do to make “hard” easier:

1. Decide what must be accomplished to hit target results. One can’t do everything. Choose to achieve what matters most and stick with going after it.
2. Analyze what barriers block the path to performance achievement. Know the root cause of non-performance. Anyone can identify the obvious. Find out what fundamentally is getting in the way.
3. Commit to developing each individual to be great at each critical success behavior. This includes performers. Star performers want to be best performers. They expect their coach to help them get to the top and stay there. Make everyone better.
4. Know each employee’s primary and secondary job motivation. Learn what makes each person “tick.”
5. Link critical success behaviors to each individual’s motivations. Ensure that what you are asking one to do makes sense from his/her perspective.
6. Work one-on-one with each employee daily. Commit to providing a minimum of two to four minutes of developmental coaching to each individual every 24 hours. It doesn’t have to be just face-to-face time. Take advantage of all available communication methods.
7. Celebrate achievement. Never miss an opportunity to reward individual success and improvement. Make a big deal out of little successes. Do it both one-on-one and in group settings. Both are important.
8. Do not tolerate non-performance. Accept only the critical success behaviors being done correctly. Stay with it until you get the necessary behavior change. If one refuses to change, help that individual understand that his/her talents may be better suited for something else.

Have fun. Coaching is a lot to do. Doing it well is fulfilling. Helping others achieve, matters.