Secrets to Successful Coaching

 

Coaching or delivering performance improvement to an employee can often be a daunting task.  For many leaders they can get butterflies or even feel sick to their stomach leading up to conversation.  It seems counter intuitive that the boss or manager would feel uneasy about delivering coaching or performance management, but it happens every day. 

This uneasiness with delivering feedback often stems from the leader having a lack of confidence in the outcome of the conversation.  This can be due to several factors, but we’ve found that it often occurs when a leader hasn’t set clear expectations, hasn’t modeled the behaviors they expect, holds people accountable inconsistently or simply hasn’t had to deliver many coaching conversations. 

Having confidence in a coaching conversation requires a few important things to have happened prior to the conversation. 

• The employee must have had a clear understanding of what outcomes were expected 
• The leader must hold themselves to the same standard they set for their teams 
• The leader must be consistent in their accountability 

Having these three things in advance are a prerequisite for successful coaching and performance management.  If a leader hasn’t set a clear expectation of outcomes for their employee, they haven’t earned the right to hold them accountable.  It’s not fair to tell an employee they need to “Do better” but not tell them what better means.  The leader cannot tell their employees they must be at work on-time but then be late regularly themselves if they want to hold their team accountable to being punctual.  Leaders that hold one team member accountable and not another will find their entire teams talk to each other and secretly rebel against the leader. 

Leaders that do not follow these principles will have coaching conversations where the employee appears disengaged, or just wants to get it over with.  They will also have combative employees, because the employee sees the conversation or performance management as unfair.  “Why do I have to hit my sales goal of Judy and Bill don’t hit theirs and get to stay here for years!?”.  Leaders that do not practice these behaviors consistency will, over time, become more and more afraid of confronting and discussing performance opportunities leading to a vicious cycle of bad performance.  Eventually the leader can become so ineffective that they themselves will need to be held accountable. 

However, If the leader is consistent in defining clear outcomes, holding everyone equally accountable with consistency and holds themselves to the same standards they will be able to have prior knowledge of how the conversation is likely to go.  With few exceptions when we’ve seen leaders that practice these tenants, they find that the employee typically agrees with the leader's assessment of their performance and understands the reason they are having the conversation.  In fact, we’ve seen leaders separate employees where the employee said they understood why it was happening and then thanked the leader for everything and shook their hand. 

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What are your secrets to successful coaching?  Let us know below!