If you haven’t yet introduced Coaching into your work environment, now’s the time! Coaching is an ongoing process to ensure that your employees’ potential is realized and even exceeded. Through this process, managers support, encourage and direct their people so they can reach their highest potential.
To be a successful coach follow these three steps:
1. Create an agreement.
Make sure both coach and employee understand their roles, responsibilities, expectations, and the length of their relationship. Whether it’s a written or a verbal agreement, it needs to be clear. While individual employees are usually assigned coaches, in team situations members should probably select a coach they all respect and one they feel will help them. The team should also agree on the style and method of coaching as well as when and how often coaching sessions will take place. Ideally, a coach should be identified as soon as possible after a team is formed.
2. Establish clear goals.
In order to coach anyone or any team to pursue excellence, you must first set goals. These should be reasonable, realistic and attainable within the established timeframe. All people involved – coach and employee or coach and team members – need to agree on the goals. When discussing them, be sure to address these concerns:
– Are the goals reasonable and realistic?
– Are the goals attainable?
– Can all timeframes be met?
– Is there enough motivation to meet the goals?
– Is there enough support to meet the goals?
– Are there adequate resources to meet the goals?
3. Set up sessions.
Coaching requires lots of time and effort. As a coach, you need to set aside blocks of time to meet with an employee or a team about any of the following topics:
– Status reports – how everything’s going and how everyone’s doing
– Achieving goals
– Missing goals
– Re-evaluating goals
– Resetting timeframes for goals
– Strategizing solutions
3 Coaching Essentials Employers and Managers Need to Know
