Everyone Wins! Coach and Mentor Employees to Higher Performances

“It's going to be a process with this team…So we're not going to see a finished product for a while.”

                                                                                 ------Phil Jackson 

Whether you oversee a professional sports team, or any other team, you are in the business of performance management. 

Some observers might think that managers should coach the weak and mentor the strong. I disagree with that statement, and I’ll explain why. 

The stakes are high, and basically managers want employees to help them succeed. Although the goals are the same, overall employee-development practices overlap. Since your goals are to increase employee productivity and improve performance, you will coach performing employees as an integral part of the mentoring process. 

Give the best your best attention, and don’t give up on the underperformers. 

Generally managers and supervisors perform a variety of roles, one of which is employee development. The responsibility for developing performing employees can take many forms, and it is a process. From the very start, then, you would want to see managers and supervisors developing one-on-one coaching and mentoring relationships with their performing employees.  

At the other end of the employee-performance scale are the underperforming employees. As another form of development, managers will want to counsel these employees. This technique is part of the coaching process, and your managers should know when and how to counsel underperforming workers. So ideally, these coaching and counseling techniques work in concert with each other. 

While it may seem as though these delineations are mere nuances or parsing of words, it’s important that managers be clear in their own minds how these various techniques take form in the workplace. The semantics represent technical distinctions. It’s helpful to understand these differences in order to minimize confusion and realize the full benefits of the employee-development processes. 

Ultimately, again, you have your performing employees—who hopefully make up the majority of your workforce—and when they are the benefactors of a good employee-mentoring program, the organization and the employees are well-rewarded.

Then you have your underperformers—who hopefully make up the minority of your workforce—and when they are the benefactors of a good employee-coaching program, the organization and the employees are also well-rewarded. 

Leadership needs to ensure that managers are developed to serve as coaches and mentors. 

Coaching and mentoring employees is a huge responsibility. Leadership should make sure those managers and supervisors who serve in coaching and mentoring roles receive proper training. Not everyone is equipped with the natural instincts to perform as an effective coach or mentor. 

Effective coaching requires specific skills; it is a learning technique, one that takes development. While everyone in the organization may generally understand coaching as a concept, this understanding doesn’t mean that they automatically know how to coach employees.   

For example, you may have an IT manager who supervises a number of employees. This manager probably has a lot more tenure, is more experienced and possesses a higher skill level. While this individual has moved up in their career, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they instinctively know how to coach other employees, although they may know how to mentor them. 

So coaching and mentoring helps leverage your managers’ experiences and accelerates employee learning and development. If performance management is skillfully executed, your employees and business will significantly benefit in rewarding ways. 

With this coaching and mentoring foundation set, I will review the employee development process in more depth in future Insights.

Some observers might think that managers should coach the weak and mentor the strong. I disagree with that statement, and I’ll explain why.