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. Here are some of the common patterns I observed
- Some high performers continued to be high performers; however, some high performers became disengaged over time and performance suffered.
- Some performers with good enough scores, continued to do just enough to avoid being in trouble, but they refused to work on other aspects of their performance. They just didn’t care to make more improvement.
- Some performers scored lower because of counterproductive habits and patterns even though their intent was positive and on the mark.
Within 6-8 weeks, we were making good progress. High performers were becoming re-engaged, lower performers were noticeably improving and even many of the complacent performers were re-energized and doing better. However, a few months into this project the company set a new policy for their managers: the managers could take no more than 15 minutes to coach an employee. While the company was very happy with the results they were seeing from coaching, it was extremely expensive to have the employees off the phones for an hour at a time. At first, I admit, I was dismayed! There’s so much value in coaching, why didn’t the company see it and invest the time in it? Finally, it occurred to me that this was the environment in which they existed. So, I had two choices, I could rail against it or I could find a way to make coaching accessible to busy managers and effective “in the moment.”
I was willing to give it a try. What I’ve seen over time is that you can create powerful results in these short interactions. I call these interactions, Coaching Moments. Here are some common Coaching Moments I've seen:
- “What Should I do?”
- The Call of Feedback
- Making the Invisible, Visible
- The Repeat Offender
There are more common Coaching Moments, and over the next few months, I will dive into them and explain how a coaching approach is different and how managers can learn it to get better results in less time.
After spending hundreds of hours working with managers to help them take a coaching approach to performance and studying human performance in graduate school, I’ve developed a simple, yet powerful model that helps managers embrace coaching. We call it “Coaching on the Go™.”
Coaching on the Go™ is a practical, effective model for taking a coaching approach to improving the performance of employees. It’s not about adding to the pressures of already over-burdened managers; it is about changing the nature of the everyday conversations that we already have with our employees. We can apply a coaching approach to these common moments so that we can get better results for our employees and ourselves.
During all of my time with managers, I have noticed the following things:
- With very few exceptions, the managers I work with truly believe in the potential of their team.
- With even fewer exceptions than the above, the managers I work with have a genuine desire to help their employees become more successful. They care.
- Without exception, the managers have so much on their plate that it pushes the boundaries of what any human being can reasonably do.
- Without exception, the managers are on the line for results that they can only really achieve through their employees.
- Finally, if you can help managers adopt an approach that works, they will embrace it – and see better results.
This is what is behind Coaching on the Go™. Managers need to know the essence of what makes coaching conversations successful: creating the right relationship, raising the awareness of the coachee, and advancing action. In many of the companies that I work with, this needs to happen in minutes, not hours.
This is the model for the three essential outcomes of Coaching on the Go™.
Enhance the Relationship.
With every interaction, we want to be building trust and enhancing the relationship. The relationship is what creates the space for growth and change. While the relationship is critical, a relationship doesn’t have to take months to create. Relationship also doesn’t mean being best buddies with someone. However, if they don’t trust you, they won’t be open to your coaching.
Raise Awareness.
Coaching is about raising awareness. When we raise the awareness of someone, we are also raising responsibility. This is the cornerstone of helping them to be able to self-monitor and self-correct in the future. If we skip over raising awareness then we are insuring that the issue will re-surface because we are not helping the person become aware of the issue at a level where they can recognize it in the future. Telling does not increase awareness. Awareness without self-discovery increases dependency and it typically decreases autonomy, which lowers motivation and engagement.
Advance Action.
Finally, we should always be helping the coachee move forward. Again, this isn’t accomplished by telling them the way to do it. The solution is owned by the person providing it. Instead we want them to think about options for moving forward, evaluate those options, and choose the option that they can commit to.
Using this approach, here are some of the results that managers have been able to achieve:
- They have been able to help high performers become superstars.
- They have been able to elevate the performance of the struggling, yet motivated employee, from mediocre to solid and good.
- They have been able to re-engage the once great performer who has been coasting on past success
- They have been able to reduce the amount of wasted time they spend on the same remedial issue with an employee.
- They have learned how to strategically use their valuable coaching time to have the greatest impact on performance results.
- The manager develops a renewed passion because they see how they can actually make a difference. As one manager stated, “I am no longer on the sidelines, helplessly watching my team struggle.”
In the coming weeks and months, I will write more about how to achieve these three outcomes (Enhance the Relationship; Raise Awareness; and Advance Action). I will also write about some of the most common Coaching Moments that I see in the field, including how to turn those moments into positive action and results. I will also explore some of the most common traps of coaching. For example, one of the most common misperceptions and most damaging traps of coaching is the apparent benefit of giving advice. Frequently, advice giving has inadvertent negative consequences, including resistance to change, dependency, short-term compliance, disengagement, and lack of initiative.
There are so many powerful benefits to coaching. This doesn’t mean, however, that your managers need to become executive or life coaches; they need to know how to apply a coaching approach in real time in order to raise the performance of others. That is the impetus behind Coaching on the Go™.
© 2011 Bobbi Kahler. All rights reserved. Developing Leaders, Creating Possibilities: Kahler Leadership Group
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