Everyone's heard the old saying, "The squeaky wheel
gets the grease." In a fast-paced work environment, where the
focus is on getting a product out the door or resolving customer
issues, the same attitude is usually taken about coaching. Coaching
is often viewed as necessary only when employee performance is
unbearably poor or when employees are so discouraged they leave.
For entrepreneurs, who often have smaller staffs and budgets,
coaching may also seem like an unnecessary expense.
Among these misperceptions about coaching, you may also be a
business owner who thinks you're too busy with your own work to
spend extra time training, communicating or boosting employee
morale, but consider this: Your leadership can help create
motivated, productive employees. These high-performance employees
will, in turn, lighten your workload. And while you're at it,
also consider the benefits of formal and informal employee
development tools, such as monthly, quarterly or annual performance
appraisals and planned performance improvement sessions which are
used by highly successful companies to bring out the best in their
employees.
Before developing and implementing new coaching methods, ask
yourself if your company has a work environment that welcomes
coaching. Are employees encouraged to share their questions,
concerns, opinions and ideas, or does your company have a
management style that operates in a more autocratic,
non-participatory manner?
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After ensuring that your company is open to coaching, make sure
any managers in your company know how to coach properly. The most
effective leaders, coaches and mentors ensure that they're
approachable, active listeners and growth facilitators and that
they guide employees as needed.
Coaching that works consists of constructive, consistent
feedback aimed at increasing awareness and resulting in improved
performance. Constructive, consistent feedback can be adopted into
a company's culture as a systematic approach to employee
development. Then once coaching's been established as part of
your company's work culture, opportunities for coaching need to
be identified. These opportunities are often simply managers and
supervisors taking advantage of occasions, both formal and
informal, to coach. The best leaders more easily identify these
occasions by familiarizing themselves with employees' work
habits, performances, goals and motivations.
Taking advantage of appropriate informal opportunities to coach
also takes the stress out of coaching. It trains leaders to manage
their time more effectively by capitalizing on opportunities to
reward, encourage and direct performance outcomes during the normal
course of any workday, while relying on the business's formal
planned processes to review progress and set planning sessions,
performance measures and expectations for the future.
Remember, too, that coaching is important not only when
there's concern about poor performance or when performance is
at its peak, but when performance is somewhere in the middle. Given
the fact that the majority of employee performance ratings occur
somewhere between outstanding and poor, this "in between"
range is where coaching can have its greatest impact.
Retaining top talent and boosting employee morale are vital to
your company's success. So rather than waiting for things to go
wrong, or accepting subpar performance, it's important that
employees receive ongoing performance feedback, or interim
coaching, because if you want better employees, you just might have
to make them.
Mary Massad is the director of HR product development for
Administaff, a leading personnel management company
that serves as a full-service human resources department for
thousands of small and medium-sized businesses throughout the
United States. For additional HR information, visit HR PowerHouse, an
HR website powered by Administaff.