By: Center for Creative Leadership

You know you need to coach your staff. If they perform well, you perform well. And, if you aren’t currently measured on your “ability to coach and develop others” — that is likely to change soon.

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Coaching from an outside expert continues to be important, but increasingly, organizations are looking at on-the-job coaching as a vital tool for developing talent and meeting performance goals. And you, the manager, play the key role.

“The problem is that leaders are being held accountable for developing others, but few are taught effective ways to coach,” says CCL’s Candice Frankovelgia. “So, they end up giving reviews, meeting occasionally and giving advice. At CCL, we’ve been helping leader coaches understand what they need to do to be an effective coach and boiling it down to specific actions.”

Whether you are a professional coach or a leader with coaching responsibilities you need to establish the relationship; incorporate assessment, challenge and support; and push for results. To gauge your effectiveness in each of these areas, consider the following elements (adapted from CCL’s Coaching for Effectiveness program and forthcoming 360-degree assessment):

Relationships. How well do you establish boundaries and build trust? To create an effective coaching relationship, you need to, among other things:

• Be clear about learning and development objectives.
• Show good judgment about which information to share and which to hold private.
• Be clear about the impact of your own behavior on employees.
• Be patient.
• Show integrity.
• Follow through on promises or agreements.
• Continually show that you have employees’ best interests in mind.

Assessment. Do you skillfully help others to gain self-awareness and insight? If so, the actions you take will include the following:

• Provide timely feedback.
• Explore the gap between current performance and desired performance.
• Help employees discover situations where their impact is different from their intentions.
• Help gain clarity about the behaviors that employees would like to change.
• Note inconsistencies between words and actions.

Challenge. Do you effectively challenge the thinking and assumptions of others? Do you encourage them to practice new behaviors and step outside of their comfort zone? As a coach, you might challenge employees by:

• Helping them explore the unintended consequences of a potential action.
• Encouraging them to generate alternative solutions to problems.
• Asking open-ended questions.
• Helping them understand the consequences of not changing key behaviors.
• Encouraging them to take reasonable risks.

Support. How well do you listen? Are you able to understand the coachee’s perspective and find ways to engage him or her in the coaching and development process – even through difficulty? Support comes in many forms, including:

• Listening carefully to the ideas and suggestions of others.
• Being open to the perspectives of others.
• Allowing employees to vent emotions without judgment.
• Encouraging employees to make progress toward their goals.
• Recognizing the success of employees.

Results. Do you help the coachee set meaningful goals and be accountable for them? If so, you are likely to help employees identify:

• Goals that will have the greatest positive impact on their effectiveness.
• Specific behaviors that will lead to achieving their goals.
• Specific metrics and milestones that employees can use to measure progress toward their goals.

“Once you have the tools and some practice under your belt, you will find that coaching is an effective way to develop and motivate direct reports,” says Frankovelgia. “But you, too, will benefit. As you improve your coaching skills, you are developing leadership capabilities that have benefits in other work relationships, too. Your ability to build relationships, elicit information, challenge assumptions, support others and clarify goals will go a long way.”

How to Create a Coaching Culture

Giving individual leaders the information they need to be effective coaches is step one. But organizations that want to build a coaching culture will also want to:

• “Seed” the organization with coaching role models.
• Link coaching outcomes to the business.
• Coach senior leadership teams.
• Recognize and reward coaching behaviors.
• Integrate coaching with other people-management processes.

About I.C. Collins

I.C. Collins is grateful that he can pursue something that is both interesting and has value on several levels. For over three decades in the Automotive Sales Industry a bottom-line guy Collins doesn't shy away from telling the truth in ways that cut through the noise to deliver streetwise and corporate knowledge from someone who's been there and done that, many times over.

He aims to create “a long-lasting major brand that for generations is a company that is business-critical to the leading brands in the world. We are focused every day on creating something that’s valuable and has permanence.”

P. S. Urgent if you’re looking to optimize your interpersonal skills for success get your copy of " How to Succeed in the Automotive Sales Industry " today @TechAutoCareers.com. Then settle in for a satisfying read that will surely enhance your interpersonal skills for success this year, it is not just a book we are a service.

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