Effective coaches keep ladder climbers from falling off the steps.
Whether or not you follow professional sports, you probably know—even at that level— player coaches are responsible for driving the performances of million-dollar, world-class athletes.
In the business world, personal coaches help drive employee performances to peak levels, as well. Well-coached employees know better how to prevail at office politics, excel in all communication arenas and yes, even achieve greater successes in the face of challenging bosses.
While coaching and mentoring utilize distinctively different approaches, as explained in my previous HRTools.com Insights, effective coaching does incorporate some mentoring aspects. Those aspects include working with employees to:
- help them take a better look at themselves and
- influence them to examine how they interact with other employees, their subordinates, their boss, their manager, etc.
In other words, a personal business coach will hold up a mirror so employees can figure out their true reflections.
As you can imagine, business, or personal, coaching is a huge responsibility and employers will want to avoid making mistakes. I’ll share one commonly made mistake.
Some organizations might blend the roles of training, coaching and mentoring and assign one person to handle all three. These three areas require distinctly different techniques. Expecting one individual to combine all these roles and apply them to one single employee is a mistake. Also, it is vitally important that organizations have coaches who have acquired the proper skill sets, backgrounds and experiences before they are assigned this responsibility.
Here is an example to help illustrate my point. You may have someone who is training an employee, and this trainer is someone who has done this job for a long time. So you charge this employee, who has 15 years experience doing ‘x, y and z,’ to help the trainee by walking through each specific step of the task. In other words, this trainer is supposed to show the trainee how to complete the task in order to be a high performer.
The above represents an effective strategy, but also is where the differences begin. An ability to train someone does not mean that this individual also has the ability to coach an employee. For instance, if an employee has an issue communicating with his/her boss, it will take someone with specific skills and the background to effectively coach an employee and help him/her remedy this situation. A personal business coach will know how to approach and diagnose the issue and help the employee work through it. On the other hand, a trainer may not necessarily know what a coach has been trained to recognize—or know what areas specifically need attention. For instance, a strained boss and employee relationship may need to be encouraged to follow the process of re-engagement, which can be achieved through masterful coaching techniques.
While it may seem as though personal business coaching is therapeutic, it is more about achieving results. If a boss and an employee are facing ‘issues,’ a coach’s job is to help influence that relationship so that the players can achieve higher productivity and score winning points for the organization.