If you’ve worked with a good coach, you know how transformational the process can be.

(If you haven’t…why not?)

Your employees need that experience as well. They’ll grow, be more engaged employees, and become happier. Your business will be all the better for it.

You don’t need to hire an outside coach for everyone in your organization. Part of the work that you and their managers do includes being their coach.

If you’ve just seen yourself as their manager, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. Actually, a big requirement. Now more than ever — when people are changing jobs at an alarming rate and everyone’s reeling from all the uncertainty in our world — you need to keep your employees engaged.

Coaching them is the way to do it.

See: Developing Your Employer Brand: How to Attract High Performers

The difference between coaching and managing

You let your employees know when they’ve made a mistake. You tell them what KPIs they need to focus on. You congratulate them when they have successes.

That’s coaching, right?

Eh, not so much.

When you manage, you’re directive. You tell your staff what you need them to do to meet certain organizational goals.

Coaching is more like a partnership between you and your team member, where you help them define their own goals and create a plan for how to get there. It’s a process that aims to improve performance and focuses on the ‘here and now’ rather than on the distant past or future.

Where a manager is focused on getting results and limiting failures and errors, a coach pays more attention to growth and effort. They’re aiming to create engagement among their employees. Where a manager attempts to control their employees’ actions, a coach empowers employees to take their own actions.

Managers solve problems and offer approval whereas coaches help others solve their own problems and offer collaboration.

Why should you coach your employees?

You build a better team through coaching. You create empowered, confident employees who can take effective action on their own.

Eventually, you may not even need to manage anymore. You’ll have the right people in the right seats and a well-oiled machine. You won’t have to tell them how to do the work or make sure they do it. Everyone is engaged and confidently does their jobs. They’ll work well together because you’ve coached them that way.

That’s the dream, right?

You could have the football team where the coach is red-faced on the sidelines, throwing down his clipboard and screaming at the players. Or you could have the team that’s so in sync, with such an empowered quarterback that the coach stands calmly by as they head to victory.

Which would you prefer?

The focus of coaching

Whether you’re a professional coach or coaching your employees, the focus of coaching is the same.

It’s about setting goals and working towards the achievement of those goals, with an outside-in perspective for the coachee. Coaching is a collaboration with the employee to identify, target, and plan for performance improvement. It builds both competencies and confidence.

Your employee may be focused on developing an actual skill, like improving their coding abilities so they can move up the ladder. Or they may need support with one of the “soft” skills — better listening in their sales calls, dealing with rejection, or improving rapport with colleagues.

See: All Employees Should Have Professional Development Plans. Do Yours?

The coaching relationship

Trust is the crux of the coaching relationship. Without it, a coach can’t make headway.

Developing that trust might be easy. If you’re a naturally empathetic and caring manager or leader, you may already be incorporating some coaching into your management style.

If that hasn’t been your style, there will be a transition period where you and your employee work together to build that trust. How do you do it? By demonstrating integrity and authenticity, making sure your behaviors align with your words.

When you encourage your employee to be vulnerable about their challenges during your coaching sessions, don’t broadcast what they share or use it against them in a team meeting. It’s not just about holding what they say in confidence. You want to show them that you’re invested in their professional wellbeing and have their best interests at heart.

A favorite quote is from Teddy Roosevelt: “People don’t care what you think until they think that you care.”

If you’ve had an employer-employee relationship where one doesn’t show weakness due to fear, then you’re both going to have to think differently about the relationship. It will take time.

You can’t flip a switch one day and be a really good coach. The people you’re coaching may not feel safe being vulnerable with you yet.

See: What Does a Good Business Coaching Relationship Look Like?

The structure of a coaching meeting

Every coaching meeting — and the coaching relationship as a whole — is a process of discovery. You’re asking questions and getting really good at listening.

A good coach might spend 80% of their time listening and only 20% talking. And a lot of that talking time is actually asking questions so that by the end you’re sure you and your employee are both leaving on the same page.

One critical note: These coaching conversations are not the same as status updates on projects. They should be completely separate. When you’re in coaching mode, you’re not in managing mode.

1. Inquiry

Start off a coaching meeting by ensuring clarity on the purpose of the coaching session.

Get the employee’s perspective and offer your own. How do they feel about their progress? Where do they think they are meeting expectations and building strengths? Where do they see gaps? Where have you experienced gaps in working with them? What is your outside-in perspective on their performance?

2. Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment is a critical piece of most fruitful discussions, coaching included. Once you’ve talked about their perspective and about yours — compare the two. Then set expectations about the gaps on which you’ll focus. The more of this that is driven by the employee, the better sense of ownership they’ll have in the solution and outcome.

3. Advocacy

Encourage your employee to tell you exactly what they want. What tools or strategies do they want to develop to help compensate for that gap?

For instance, say one of your sales employees is really struggling when they get rejections on their sales calls. Too many “no” answers start to derail their momentum, and they lose confidence on future calls.

What do they want? To get better at sales calls? To better manage the rejection? To shift to a different role of the organization where they don’t do sales calls?

4. Problem solving

Create a joint action plan for the future. Once you’re an experienced coach, you’ll try to get them to problem solve. You’re not going to do it for them. An employee might feel like they’re in an unfair match with you, their boss. If they express an opinion about the plan, and you express a different opinion about the plan, who’s going to win?

So you want to get your employee to solve their own problems so they’ll have ownership over it.

Back to our sales call example: say your employee wants to better manage the rejections, and their suggested solution is to “just get used to rejections.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get used to the things that are hard for us?

Since that’s not an effective solution, you may need to help guide them to an alternative through discovery questioning. Maybe you can get them to suggest keeping a spreadsheet of every positive response they’ve received from a sales call and peruse it after each rejection.

The specific strategy doesn’t matter so long as they do it and it works for them: what tools can they use to rebuild their confidence after a rejection?

Finally, set a time for followup.

See: Is it Time to Hire a Leadership Coach?

Final thoughts

Coaching works. I’ve seen it in my own clients, and I’ve seen it in their teams. It’s the number one most important task for effective leaders.

Why? Because it helps align an individual’s goals with the organization’s goals. It improves productivity, not to mention engagement and retention. It encourages employees to develop their own entrepreneurial spirit, which increases job satisfaction as well as innovation within the company.

If you’re ready to transition from managing your team to coaching your team, contact us to see how we can help.