Coaching

The most effective and successful managers follow the 4 main principles:

• Get to know your people
• Talk a lot about performance
• Grow and improve your people
• Push more work down

By using the 4 main tools:

Why do some managers not coach?

• They are unaware that it is needed or valuable
• They believe their direct reports should improve on their own
• They don’t know how
• They rely on some high performers to save their reputation

Even though coaching is useful for anyone, when managers do coach, it’s usually in one of the following cases:

• A very low performer, honestly trying to save them or just document the attempt for legal reasons
• A very high performer missing one small thing to get promoted
• Trying to retain a high performer who might otherwise leave

There is a common trap — spending more time with the lower performers, which brings very little value compared to spending time with high performers — a 10% improvement of a high performer is much more significant than a lower performer’s.
This phenomena is referred to as “manage by exception” — spotting and trying to fix something wrong rather than “manage by opportunity” to bring more value.

Improvement is always needed. Our industry, competitors and market grow, pushing our company, department and colleagues to grow, and if we don’t, we stay behind. This also mean that a small growth may not be sufficient.

Even though coaching in sports has a positive connotation, at work it usually has a negative one, attached to failure, not to improvement, sometimes even as the last step HR requested before terminating.
Whenever talking to directs about coaching, remind it’s about improving, not punishing or humiliating. We will all get better.

What is coaching?

Manager supervising and supporting the direct’s efforts of self improvement in favor of the organization (for weaknesses and strengths)

This coaching is also known as a skills developer.

It doesn’t mean that the manager is the teacher! The direct does 95% of the work. This is also aligned with the adult learning model — learning by doing, which requires both the motivation to learn and the self execution of actions. Merely consuming information like pedagogy — children at school, will not bring the desired results, whether people prefer to consume it by reading, listening or watching.

You always giving the solution is efficient, but ineffective:

• Directs don’t learn to try things out and solve problems on their level
• You become a bottleneck
• Management economics — it’s cheaper when the direct is doing it

Before coaching

As we’ll shortly see, coaching is not lightweight, and you’d better use other tools before coaching.

Let’s assume you’ve noticed a specific behavior or application of skill that requires improvement by one of your direct reports.

You have been having 1:1s, building relationship and trust, which are essential to leading any desired change — people need to want to follow, otherwise you only get compliance.

You have been giving clear feedback about the specific issue, maybe more than once.

The behavior did not improve so far.

You suggested ideas how to improve and delegated, but still see no result.

Change is hard and the behavior is probably there for years already, so it’s not surprising. Now is the time to turn to the next tool — coaching.

Coaching Steps

1. Collaborate on goals with the direct report
2. Brainstorm on resources
3. Collaborate on the plan
4. Direct acts and reports on the plan

1. Collaborate on goals

Discuss with the direct report on what to improve and how. Rather than dictating, collaboration guarantees they are invested and will follow whole-heartedly. This means that if there are several options, let them choose everything you agree to, like when, how, or the order of actions.

There are cases like a top performer missing small thing or someone who might be terminated, in which more dictating makes sense.

The goal

Pick one behavior or result you want to see by some date.

It must be objectively measured — any dispute will ruin the momentum and can break the process. We measure because we care, like the company measures profit, not in order to scold.

Learning something, “being aware”, reading or watching — are not goals (they may be necessary steps).

We want a behavior change, a practical demonstrable skill (“hard” or “soft”).

We prefer a single “event” over continuous measurement, such as a certification, leading a specific meeting effectively (needs an objective definition), submission of a report or a plan, because small misses on the way can drag and set back.

A goal is needed, because otherwise the direct might feel “it’s enough” after achieving 80% and lose momentum.

We don’t need a special form, we can document in the shared 1:1 notes.

A target date is crucial, because without it there is no sense of urgency (humans are deadline driven) and the direct will be forever “working on it” as it will usually have lower priority during work days.

Tend to give more time: let’s say you decided together on 2 months, and after them the direct was not successful and you decided on another month — it would have been better to decide on 3 in advance to not feel like a failure.
Remember, they had this difficulty for years and change is hard.

Behavior is very specific, something you can easily see in your mind when you hear it, without the need to interpret or explain.
E.g. “Being a jerk” is not a behavior, while disrupting people when they talk is.
“You’re a jerk” can be easily denied, like “I just gave the full picture”.

It’s also not the personality. All were interested in is a set of behaviors that are effective at work.

2. Brainstorm on resources

For the decided upon goal — brainstorm together on possible resources.

Remember — the manager does NOT need to be expert on the topic!
If managers can only coach on what they are skilled at, it would be very limiting and time consuming.

Optionally, part of the coaching can be finding how to obtain the desired skill, trying and seeing what works.

As always with brainstorming, it is about quantity, gathering 20–30 ideas without evaluating them during the collection.
We don’t know what will work, we collect all (im)possible ideas, and we’ll pick the best ones to start with, try them and adapt.

If your direct is a High S, C they might need time to prepare ideas in advance.

3. Collaborate on the plan

From the brainstormed resources — pick the best ones.
Prefer the direct’s way, e.g. books for a high C over coach which is more suitable for a high I, and start with time/money-cheaper ones.

Break down to micro steps, which don’t take much time, and any delay is short and easily fixable, such as:

• Report to me the researched book to read by August 1st 17:00
• Report to me you ordered the book by August 5th 17:00
• Report to me you read the intro by August 10th 17:00
• Send me summary of chapter 1 in 3 sentences by August 25th 17:00

We don’t want to plan too much ahead because things will change as we go.

Micro steps are not micro management, they in fact set up for success and have been working well for decades.
Micro management is a manager telling you what, when, how to do, watch you do, tell you it’s wrong, do it themselves, tell you she cannot trust you, etc.

Note how we prevent “chasing” after the direct for progress by making the reporting part of the task, otherwise it’s considered failed. This way there is a low chance of delays where the manager is not aware and can quickly help.

Again, tend to be generous with target dates, and push back if dates don’t make sense.

In the end verify: “Are you feeling good about the tasks and dates?”

4. Direct acts and reports on the plan

The work, or 95% of it, is done by the direct report. Using the sports metaphor again, coaching is not about having nice conversations, it’s more like regularly going to the gym.

This is the secret to how you can make the coaching happen by spending a few minutes in the end of 1:1s, on a topic you’re not expert one, for all your directs.
This is different from training, where you are the expert, requiring a bigger time investment.

Give positive feedback on finishing tasks on time and make sure to celebrate milestones to keep the positive momentum.

In case of failure, don’t punish — give negative feedback and set a new target date. Think “80% progress” over “missed 20%”.

• “Can I give you some feedback?
  When you don’t finish your tasks, you will have the next ones delayed as well. Can you do better next time?”
• “When you didn’t meet with your mentor, it made her less committed to help. Can you do better next time?”
• “Your goal was to not interrupt more than 2 times and you did 4. Can you continue to work on it?”

If running out of tasks, it’s a great thing:

• Your direct finished early
• Your direct worked hard to improve, what can be better?
• It’s an excellent opportunity for positive feedback
• Positive momentum of the successful progress

In the next 1:1 dedicate time to continue the plan — e.g. extend what worked so far, like another book, or pick the next idea from the pile, which is another reason for having a large quantity of ideas.

If the whole coaching “fails”, we do not threat, punish or impose sanctions (unless they refused to engage or didn’t really work on it).
If they achieved 70%, that’s already a huge improvement.

Pick the next behavior to improve on.

Case study

A classic example is of a technically strong direct who doesn’t get along with his colleagues — they don’t want to work with him.
Often people “tag” others (“jerk”) not noticing the set of specific behaviors, and also miss when they successfully improve.

We try to fix a specific behavior, one at a time.

0. Before coaching

The manager identified the faulty specific behavior as interrupting people while they speak.

The manager gave feedback: “Can I give you some feedback? When you cut people, they think you are disrespectful and prefer to not engage with you. Can you stop that?” but there was no behavior change.
After another such case, the manager gave feedback again and asked “what will you do better next time?” and the direct was not able to come up with ideas.

The manager notified the direct about coaching model and the need for coaching.

1. Goal

The manager collaborated with the direct about the goal.
In this case the behavior was known, and we needed a date and a measurable event to determine success.

The manager started with the date “By August 30th, …” and moved to the event “you will not interrupt a single time in any of the 4 meetings, while contributing 6 times”.

2. Resources

The brainstorming brought possible resources: a coach, a specific podcast, “Influence” book, colleague’s recommendations, HR expert on relationships, …

3. Plan

A coach was the one chosen to start with, then the tasks followed:

1. By Tue 17:00, show me a list of 5 possible coaches in our area
2. By Thu 17:00, show me the order in which to call them
3. By Mon 17:00, tell me who you chose after talking to them
4. By Tue 17:00, report to me you submitted request to finance

4. Direct acts and reports

The direct notified via email the completion of the tasks and during 1:1s new tasks were picked.

The manager gave positive feedback “when you work hard and finish on time, it gives me confidence you will succeed”.

Resources

Manager Tools — actionable guidance for managers

Effective leadership is learned
To learn more or reach out, visit my website or LinkedIn