Episode #449: The Coaching Process for Leaders

One of the big differences in the job when you move up in the ranks into a leadership position is you are now responsible for others and their development. That means we need to coach our team members by ourselves. Yes, HR may be able to organise valuable training opportunities, but that still leaves our role to follow up on that training and also to do on the job coaching every day. To better understand how to coach others, let’s look at the Seven Step Coaching Process

1. Identify Opportunities

There are five ways to identify opportunities for your staff to receiving coaching.

1. You identify an opportunity for another person. You notice a weakness in their current skill set or you notice they haven’t been trained for a certain part of the task or you give them a new task that they don’t have any experience with.

2. The person identifies an opportunity for themselves. The staff member finds they don’t know what they are doing or finds they can’t do the task well. They may have little experience with a certain aspect of the job. Or they may be ambitious and want to receive more training to help them elevate their career.

3. A customer, vendor or outsider identifies an opportunity. There is nothing like a customer complaint to highlight areas where you have missed training for the staff members. One simple one that drives me crazy in Japan is people are not trained on how to answer the phone properly. When you call, whoever answers just says “XYZ company” and don’t offer their name. This can be embarrassing for the caller, because you say, “Can I speak to Suzuki please?” and then they say “This is Suzuki speaking”. Uh oh, you didn’t remember their voice. This make you feel bad, but why do I have to feel bad or embarrassed? What if they just said, “This is XYZ company, Suzuki speaking”. How hard is that to organise? Not hard at all, just some simple training needed.

4. You identify new skills needed within your team. Business is constantly changing and one of the dangers for career advancement, is that what you were hired for and what the job requires today are different. When I first started in office work we had a Telex machine. You never see a Telex machine anymore because the technology has moved on. This is a metaphor for our work skills. We have to be constantly making efforts to keep up with the changes going on in business. The boss’s job is to coach their people or get training for them to help them adjust to the changes.

5. A situation creates an opportunity. If we get some new technology, then we need to coach those who don’t know how to use it. If the work content changes, we need to coach people on the new skills sets they need. If someone is promoted they may need more coaching at the start of the new task because they are not 100% competent in every aspect. This situation has certainly arisen since we all started working at home because of the pandemic. New people who joined after January 2020 may have had no one around to ask about anything they were puzzled by. When our new Training Manager joined in April 2020, we were all working at home and I spoke to him every day for months, to try and help him with the onboarding process.

2. Picture the Desired Outcome

What would success look like in the coaching of the individual? How would we know if we were successfully coaching them? What is our vision or what end goal is in our mind for this coaching activity? It is critical that the goal be owned by both parties.

3. Establish the Right Attitudes

How well we really know our people may determine how quickly we will know if we have the right people on the right bus and in the right seats. We will also understand what motivates them.

4. Provide the Resources
Of all the resources required, by far the most rare, precious and valuable is coach time. We cannot expect people to perform and then deny them the required support. This could include money, equipment, training information, and upper management support

Coaching our team members is actually job number one for the boss. You get this wrong and trouble is bound to be close at hand. We shouldn’t confuse time efficiency with being effective as the boss. Investing the time and working on building our ability to leverage the talent available to us is the best way forward.