Leadership Lessons: Developing and Coaching Others

You're Accountable for Your Employees' Successes

I read an article the other day that was an interview with legendary UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden. It discussed how coaching for sports is similar to coaching people in business. Wooden said, "Every one of us is different. We are similar in so many respects, but we are not identical." The person in leadership must carefully analyze everyone under his supervision to the best of his ability.

Traditionally, many managers have not looked at each of their employees carefully on an individual basis and coached each one appropriately. This is one area that new and even seasoned managers have had very little training: How to effectively coach team members. Motivation, support, and coaching from managers can help an individual to develop, grow, and improve performance.

Some Perspective

Providing employees coaching early helps managers assess employees' bench strength and progress to find out who still needs help. Coaching helps employees develop and improve performance. Even more than that, it helps encourage employee decision-making, creativity, and skill development.

In sports, coaches put emphasis on practice and typically determine who is going to play based on how the individual practices. How you practice usually determines how you will play. Good, consistent practice skills translate into playing and actual performance. The problem is, how do you learn to become a great coach who can consistently reinforce the skills of a team member, while at the same time, help that individual to better grasp new skills?

Coach Wooden said that being accused of "not having much depth" on his team never bothered him. He was more interested in having a team of players working hard on the fundamentals. It was more important to have them well-trained and working together. Similarly, it is important to employees that their manager has a mind-set of developing and coaching. This promotes an increase of the skills and capabilities of every member on the team.

A Solution

If you are going to invest time, money, and resources into training and developing employees, it is worthwhile to focus on programs that lead to true behavior change and performance improvement. Teaching managers effective coaching skills is one of the best ways to get a great return on your training investment.

Vital Learning's "Developing and Coaching Others" teaches managers to use coaching to reinforce new skills. Then, employees become comfortable with the new skills; these new skills turn into habits.

"Developing and Coaching Others" teaches managers to effectively recognize and handle coaching moments so that they can make learning decisions themselves. This is a different approach to changing behavior and upping the score on performance by meeting two key objectives:

• First, to provide managers with skills and strategies to guide their people through a learning process, including tactics to help them before, during, and after training. That way you can ensure that behavior change is made.
• And secondly, to provide managers with a coaching moments model to help their teams gain understanding and insight about their actions. This way, self-awareness with opportunities to learn and improve is supported.
  

The Supervision Series is designed to meet your training and budgetary needs. Want to learn more about "Developing and Coaching Others" or the complete Vital Learning leadership development curriculum?
Available in Classroom, Online, or Blended delivery options, the Vital Learning curriculum includes the following essential topics

• Delegating - understanding when to use delegation and how to make it motivating
• Disciplining - understanding how to discipline others to eliminate problem behavior
• Complaints - being able to effectively manage complaints
  
• Coaching - knowing how to productively coach job skills
  
• Project Management - being able to run projects, both on-time and on-budget Conflict - understanding how to successfully resolve conflict
  
• Hiring Winning Talent- knowing what to do to consistently hire the right talent
  
• Providing Feedback - understanding how to establish performance goals and standards and give feedback
  
• And more...
  

For details go to www.TheLearningEngine.org