Date: On Demand (access any time)
Investment: $285 per person
(Discounts for multiple participants)
INCLUDES: One-on-One Telephone Coaching
Coaching skills are an essential part of great management skills. Coaching can be described a method or technique used to guide an individual to new learning in defined time frames.
There are many reasons to coach individual team members, one of the main reasons is to affect the individual’s performance or performance coaching, which can be defined as a way to:
- Assess the individuals potential
- Maximise performance
- Help acquire and develop skills
- Identify what is going wrong and facilitate opportunities for development
Performance coaching is not about:
- Managing poor performance
- Highlighting failures and weaknesses
- Exploring personal issues
- Giving advice or mentoring
Why is Coaching Important?
- Coaching is the most effective way to develop your employees
- It helps your team build their skill levels and makes your job as a manager easier
- It improves productivity as employees know what their goals are and how to achieve them.
- It provides guidance and feedback to your employees on a continuous basis.
Tips & Strategies for Coaching
Over the next couple of pages we will look at each letter of the acronym COACH in order to understand the behaviours required to coach employees for performance. We will also take a deeper look at what is coaching and it’s impact on your employees and explore the GROW model for effective coaching.
1. What is Coaching?
Coaching is a continuous process that is designed to help an employee become more competent and overcome barriers to improving performance.
Coaching involves a change in behaviour. Coaching is not about discussion personal issues with the employee, even if they affect his or her performance—this would fall under the realm of counselling.
2. Behaviours required to C.O.A.C.H
C—Collaborate: You need to work with the employee to identify the problem, set standards and performance goals and develop an improvement plan.
O—Own: Both you and the employee need to own the issue. Did you set clear expectations and enable the employees success?
A—Acknowledge: You need to acknowledge both success and also the issues, problems, and concerns that an employee may have.
C—Communicate: You need to listen, question, give and receive feedback and practice two-way communication in order to be an effective coach.
H—Help: You are not only a coach, but also an advisor, you are your employees resource and guide to things and resources both within and outside the organisation.
3. The GROW Model
The GROW model for coaching stands for:
- G— Goal
- R— Reality
- O— Options
- W— Way Forward
4. G—Establish the Goal
In this step you need to work with your employee to establish a goal or outcome to be achieved. Remember to set goals that are specific, measurable and realistic. Some questions to ask include:
- How will you know if you have achieved that goal?
- What will success look like?
5. R—Examine the current Reality
It is very important to ask your team members to describe what their current reality looks like. You must know where you stand in addition to where you need to go. Some coaching questions to ask at this time are:
- What is happening right now?
- What, who, when and how often questions
- What is the result of doing what we are doing?
6. O—Explore the Options
Once you have understood what is currently going on, it is time to explore what the possibilities are in terms of all the options you have to solve the problem.
Some questions you can ask at this stage include:
- What else could you do?
- What if we did not have this constraint?
- What are the pro’s and con’s of each option?
- How will you weigh or rate these options?
7. W—Establish the Will
While it is important to set the goal, evaluate the current reality, and establish options, this in itself is not enough to achieve what you want your team member to achieve. Your team member also needs to commit to the goal which will in turn motivate him or her to stick to and achieve the goal.
Here are some questions for you to ask at this stage:
- What are you going to do now and when?
- What obstacles could you face?
- How will you overcome them?
- What option will you choose and how will this achieve your goal?
- How likely is success with this option?
- What else will you do?
