The Manager's Coaching Source Article List
The Source of Powerful Coaching: Relationship or Techniques?
When we work with managers who coach employees, we emphasize the importance of the coaching relationship itself as a key determinant of coaching success. The manager and employee who feel a level of trust and safety with each other tend to get better coaching results. How coaching produces learning is still under research, but early evidence shows that the relationship matters far more than any particular coaching model or approach. Read more...
When Coaching Struggles or Fail: Coachability or Coaching Ability?
The employee might earn the label “uncoachable” because the manager has done everything she knows to do. In many organizations, this label can stick and become part of the employee’s reputation, limiting perceived performance and career options.Before giving up on the possibility of helping the employee, consider the following possibilities for coaching difficulties or failures. Coaching will struggle or fail if one or more of the following three issues is present.
- The employee is unable or unwilling to build an effective coaching partnership because of very low coachability.
- The manager is unable or unwilling to build an effective coaching partnership because of beliefs or skill deficiencies that are counterproductive to coaching the coaching relationship and coaching skills proficiency.
- The employee is not actually a fit for the job they have. (This article will not cover concerns about employee selection and job fit.)
My Employees Won't See Their Performance Gaps
"I simply have to tell them.”
Without a doubt, this is one of the most common concerns I hear from managers as they embark on the process of incorporating coaching into their management style. Read more...
Help Your Team Build Real Confidence
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Dallas, coaching a very successful District Manager. His team is very, very good. However, at one point in our conversation, he said to me, “If I could just get them to realize how good they are, they would be even more successful. They could really blow the doors off of their sales! But, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell them how great they are, it just doesn’t seem to sink in. I wish I could help them become more confident.”
As a manager, you can help your team become more confident; but you cannot do it by praise alone. Read more...
Should Coaching Solve Today's Challenge or Build Future Capacity?
This month, we are going to explore why much of the coaching provided in the workplace today is less effective than it could be. Let us begin with an example: We recently worked with a sales manager who was coaching one of his sales reps. The rep was working on the final stages of landing a major account, and the manager was discussing strategy to increase the chances of the rep’s success. With the benefits of the manager’s approach, the rep did land the account, and it was hailed as a major win for the company. This sounds like a great success, and of course there is no doubt that winning a great contract with a great client is an important priority. But there is a major problem for the sales manager, the rep, and the company, a sort of wolf in sheep’s clothing. Read more...
Coaching on the Go™: Effective Coaching in Moments
I’ve been working with the call center division of a Fortune 50 health care industry client to help them raise performance and the quality of customer interactions. For this company, the stakes are high. Providing high quality customer is expensive, so the operation has to be efficient. The regulatory requirements are stringent, and mistakes are potentially disastrous. The company’s quality evaluation process includes meetings in which the customer service reps are alerted to performance gaps and are given quality improvement plans. But even with these efforts to improve quality, some sticky challenges remained and progress was slow or stalled. Read more...
On Thanksgiving, my husband and I went cross-country skiing. I’ve only been on skis a couple of times in my life and that was quite a few years ago. I was both excited to learn and a little fearful: What if I fall? What if I hurt myself? What if I’m not very good? What if I look like an idiot? Yet, the prospect of learning to gracefully glide across the beautiful Colorado snow was quite alluring. Continue reading...
Are You Setting Goals or Setting Your Team Up to Fail?
Researchers in human change theory and adult learning theory have looked at two types of goals: performance-outcome goals and learning goals. Performance-outcome goals are the ones that we most generally see in organizations. Learning goals are much rarer. That’s unfortunate. Continue reading...
Hardiness and Resilience Article Review
This article looks at the link between hardiness and coping with stress. According to the article, hardiness is characterized by as a combination of commitment, control and challenge. Continue reading...
6 Coaching Traps Managers Make and How to Avoid Them
Managers have a lot of responsibilities, and adding coaching to the long list can actually reduce time and effort required for managing and supervising. But sometimes getting started with coaching is frustrating for the manager and employees alike because traps and miscues make coaching less effective than it could be. Here are six traps I see most frequently when observing managers coaching employees and what to do to improve coaching approach and skills. Continue reading...
How to Get Employees to Accept Your Feedback
One of the most common questions I hear from managers is, “How do I get my employees to accept my feedback?” I am sure there are many ways to go about this, but whenever I hear this question, I think about one of the first managers I ever worked with, Frank. Frank was not a warm and fuzzy type of manager: he was tough, he had high expectations, and he didn’t put up with low performance. Continue reading...
Leadership: The Relationship between leaders and followers
Messick focuses on leadership as the relationship between leaders and their followers. This is quite similar to the leader-follower exchange. The heart of his idea is that people follow because they gain something by following. What do followers gain? 1. Vision and direction. Continue reading...
There's much debate about which leadership style is best. Back in 2000, Daniel Goleman published an article in the Harvard Business Review (March-April), based upon his research. The following is a summary of that article. Continue reading...
Turning What Your Employees Know into Effective Action
A few weeks ago, I was coaching a sales manager, “Andy.” We were talking about one of his employees, Lisa, who is having the same performance issue that she had back in December. Essentially, Lisa is being an order taker with clients as opposed to being more of a partner/consultant. There seems to be no improvement in this area at all. Lisa is bright, motivated and truly wants to do well at her job. It has left Andy confused. He said to me, “I don’t get it. She knows what to do so why isn’t she doing it?” Continue reading...
