Episode #324: Why Coaching Is So Important Today

We all accept that high performance athletes need high level coaches. What about in the work place? Are we providing our staff with the necessary high level coaching so that they can be their most productive possible. We often look at the staff’s deficiencies but remain blind to our own failings as coaches. Where do we start? What do we need to do? Do we need to coach everyone?

Well, what sort of staff need coaching? We can apply a triage to the team to decide what is needed where. In a Level One case, if they are still learning their job, then they need skill development coaching. In Level Two, if they are experienced, but have hit a plateau in their performance, they need to learn how to motivate themselves, through receiving additional coaching. At Level Three, if they are already a high performer, coaching can groom them for future leadership positions. Sounds tremendously logical but there is a problem though.

Let’s look at the best case, the Level Three staff. While a supremely talented or technically adept staff member is an asset to the organization, if they are not highly engaged, then their full potential is not going to be realized. It hasn’t happened by itself, so they need coaching to become more highly engaged. Looking at your team, are you satisfied with their engagement levels? Try this quick “Levels of Staff Engagement Quiz”. Write their names down the left side of a piece of paper, then next to each name, score them from Very Low (VL), Low (L), Medium (M), High (H) to Very High (VH) levels of engagement. Looking at the results, how did you score them? Are there some who are not scoring as highly as you need?

If so, how do we encourage our team to be highly engaged? This is where our coaching ability comes in. Let’s explore further the connection between coaching and engagement. We know there are three drivers of employee engagement: satisfaction with immediate manager, belief in senior leadership and pride in the organization

The relationship with the immediate manager is obviously of critical importance. There are also some emotional trigger points in that relationship with the immediate boss, which set off a chain reaction to boost engagement levels. Our research found that when staff feel valued through receiving coaching, it sets off a chain reaction. They feel more inspired, enthusiastic and empowered. These are the prerequisites for feeling engaged.

The most important trigger to create high levels of engagement was to feel valued by the boss. The act of coaching concretely demonstrates that the boss values the staff member. The boss makes the time for them and works with them to boost their career. Time is the most valuable resource of a busy, busy boss and giving that to their team is the public endorsement of their importance.

There have been many studies done on millennials and they show that today’s younger generation are impatient for personal development. Coaching is an important tool for developing staff capabilities and it is also important in retaining staff. The younger generation are in decreasing supply in Japan, so managers who can retain their staff will be highly valued by senior management.

On the other hand, if staff are leaving, it is costly from a number of angles: lost time, recruiting costs, opportunity cost of training new staff and dislocation in the team. We recently had to find two new staff. One left to become a full time carer for her aged mother-in-law and the other went from full time trainer to contract status. The recruiter costs and time spent on this have been gob smacking. Some staff departures you cannot help. However, if we all want to keep our younger staff in particular, then we need to start coaching them properly. The grass should not look greener on the other side of the fence.

You are already too busy with your own work and you may be thinking what is the ROI for me in investing in coaching the staff? Here are some powerful reasons to get busy coaching your team.

1. More capable staff produce better results and you can meet your team KPIs
2. Senior management are always looking for talented individuals who can develop other talent, so you will get promoted
3. Coaching takes you deep into knowing the individual’s motivation and you will be better able to align their vision for themselves with the company’s vision, which will make them more happy and productive
4. Through successful delegation, capable staff free up the boss’s time to enable work on the most high value tasks, that only the boss can do
5. Without trust, you will never be a true leader. Coaching builds that needed trust

Immediately take action. Apply the triage by first identifying which staff are in Level One, Level Two and Level Three divisions of your team? Do the “Levels of Staff Engagement Quiz”. We know that “feeling valued” is a key trigger for getting high levels of engagement. Ask yourself, are you sufficiently demonstrating you value your team members through your coaching? How much time to do you spend coaching the team each week? Yelling out commands and giving orders doesn’t count as coaching time when you are calculating the nanoseconds you spend on this each week at the moment.

We can all do a better job of coaching our teams. We just have to change our mentality, our time allocation and find the time to do it. Not doing is not an option today. Those who haven’t worked this out will soon and it will be a painful process. Let’s see ourselves as high level coaches for high performing teams.