Is Your Business Stuck in a Rut? Consider a Personal Coaching Training Program

Are your employees giving it, and you, their best? 

In another HRTools.com Insight, I described how personal coaches help drive employee performances to peak levels. We see evidence of how well this approach works in the professional sports world, for example, with player coaches who drive the performances of million-dollar, world-class athletes. 

As Ara Parasheghian, former college football coach, most notably for the University of Notre Dame, said, “A good coach will make his players see what they can be rather than what they are.” 

Personal coaches take on significant responsibilities for other human beings. Therefore, it is important that coaches-to-be participate in a well developed training program. Here are some points you will want to consider when developing such a program: 

1. To begin with, you will want to establish a formalized process.
2. Determine your baseline. Get everyone involved and determine their views. What do they think a training program is? Was it effective for them? What does coaching mean to them? What parts of any previous coaching experiences were successful? What preconceived notions do they have about a coaching program?
3. Develop a personal coaching training program that is completely separate from a regular training program. This point is important if you want this training program to be successful, and if you want to ensure that you get a return on your investment.
4. Make it transparent. If a problem surfaces or if participants get off track and adjustments are required—it’s similar to any change in management—you will need collaborators and team leaders. These individuals are the evangelists who drive this new program. They are the ones who can be very transparent and say, “It’s working here, or it is not working there, so we need to make some tweaks.”
5. Keep in mind that coached employees are emotionally engaged and invested. If they don’t get anything back from the coaching program, invariably they will become frustrated. There needs to be 360-degree communication. Once you begin a coaching session, it’s essential that feedback is given right away and that no one is left hanging. If employees feel left hanging or forgotten about, you will find that sort of outcome is probably the quickest way to lower your employees’ level of enthusiasm about working for your company.
6. Outline your steps and include an action plan. Detail how the coached employee will be moved from his or her current place to another place. Be pragmatic and systematic. Decide how you will approach the plan and how the communication will work with the coached employee. You want to make sure you are communicating effectively, so employees don’t later feel that the coach was being unfair or inaccurate. Again, that 360-degree communication flow is important. 

A formalized training program can serve employers in various ways. For instance, I once worked with a struggling, family-owned business that finally admitted, as Parasheghian’s quote implies, “We need to take a step back and evaluate where we are versus where we can be, considering the skill sets and talents we have.” In other words, they needed to remove the ‘halo effect’ from that organization where everyone seemed perfect and no one wanted to step on any toes. 

Looking back now—stepping back was a tough call to make, on their part. 

So this family-owned business participated in an assessment in order to figure out who was good at doing what—and who was not good at doing what they were trying to do—and we began developing a formalized plan. 

This is exactly what they needed to do, and I am certain that it all worked out primarily because the company’s founder was willing to take a step back and say, “You know what? I am committed to making this plan work. I want to grow this company, and I know that we have to go through this process. So I am willing to look into this realistic mirror that you’re holding in front of me and figure out where we need to go from here.” 

It was a daunting task, but through a well developed personal coaching training program, they turned it into an opportunity to move from a struggling position to a more successful place.

Are your employees giving it, and you, their best?