July 28, 2010

This is Part 1 of an article well written by Brian Emerson and Anne Loehr. You will definitely benefit from this article.

A good manager must master the use of a number of different tools and know when each is appropriate and when it is not. Coaching is just one of these skills. We don’t want to give the impression that if a manager spends all of his time coaching, life will be dandy. Nothing could be further from the truth. An effective manager needs to know how and when to use the tool of coaching and when to pick another, more appropriate tool. There is an old adage that says, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

We are the first to admit that coaching is not the only, or necessarily the best, management tool. However, when used appropriately in the right situation, coaching is a sure fire way of developing and managing the people who report to you.

What Is the Tool of Coaching?

As we said, coaching is not the end-all-and-be-all of management tools. Employees need coaching when they are experiencing problems with the Attitude (motivation, confidence, energy, focus, determination) component of the Success Equation. Good indicators of a coaching situation are things like:

  • when a person is experiencing trouble completing a job that he should already know how to do (i.e., there is no Aptitude issue), 
  • when a person has gotten himself completely wrapped around the axle about a certain situation, or
  • when a person needs help dealing with the frustration he experiences because they do not have the resources needed to complete the task at hand.

As humans, when we are in these situations, it is natural to need help getting ourselves out of the weeds. We need someone or something to help get us to a place where we can see things clearly and make solid decisions from a position of effectiveness and empowerment instead of a place where we are completely hung up and not seeing straight. That’s where coaching comes in. Managers should use coaching as a tool when an employee has the skills and ability to do the specific task, but for some reason they are struggling with the confidence, focus, motivation, drive, or bandwidth to deal with the situation in a manner that is as effective as possible.

Much to the dismay of many managers, Attitude issues usually far outweigh Aptitude issues. Try this experiment:

  • Think about your employees and the colleagues around you.
  • Take a minute and make a list of the types of things that they spend the majority of their time struggling with.
  • Examine the list.
  • How many things on the list have to do with Aptitude—not having the skills and abilities to do the tactical aspect of their jobs?
  • How many have to do with motivation, frustration, energy, focus, confidence, interpersonal issues, that is, the intangible things that have nothing to do with the actual skill of completing the job at hand (the “Attitude” part of the Success Equation)?

Usually, the majority of items on such a list involve Attitude—the keystone in the Success Equation that affects the Level of Success in exponential ways. If managers want their employees to be effective, they need to be able to help them deal with all of the things that are in the Attitude grouping from the exercise above. Coaching is about providing the support and guidance necessary to do just that.

Again, our definition of a coach is someone who helps another person reach higher levels of effectiveness by creating a dialogue that leads to awareness and action. Sounds good, huh? But what does it really mean and how does that help develop employees in the situations identified above? Let’s break it down. 

  • Dialogue. A dialogue is a conversation in which both parties are seeking understanding. They are not trying to prove, teach, or motivate each other to do something. Coaching is a conversation in which the coach attempts to understand, and, thereby, helps the coachee to understand, what and how it is that the coachee is blocking his own success. A coach “creates” this dialogue by using skills such as listening, asking, and others outlined in chapter 3, and by focusing on helping the other person.
  • Helpful. There has to be a genuine concern for the coachee on the part of the coach. To be effective, a manager has to really want to see the employee succeed, and he must hold the belief that his own success is connected to the success of the employee. A certain level of trust must exist and the coach cannot be in a situation whereby he is trying to “fix it.” This is tough. For the most part, managers are where they are in life because they are good at fixing things. They are so used to fixing problems, that they often don’t put themselves in the role of helping other people fix it for themselves.
  • Awareness. The reason that a coach or manager does not try to “fix it” when he is coaching is because people learn more when they figure things out for themselves, especially when they are learning about how their Attitude is hindering their level of success. People learn more when they can be involved in their own teaching, and they are much more likely to take action on that teaching and apply it again in other situations if they have discovered it for themselves.
  • Action. At the end of a coaching dialogue, there is action of some sort. The coachee will do something differently, shift the direction of a goal, or try a new approach to his situation. Without action, the dialogue is just a nice conversation between an employee and a concerned manager, not coaching.
  • Higher Level of Effectiveness. The goal of the entire coaching process is to lead to higher levels of effectiveness. This is important to keep in mind, because coaching is not a quick-hit tool. It takes time, has a laid-back pace, and usually requires a manager to stop what he is doing and focus completely on the employee and the coaching situation. The good news to all of this is that when done correctly and in the right situation, coaching works to make the job of the manager easier because it develops employees who are learning and looking for new and better ways of doing their jobs and meeting company objectives in a timelier manner.

So, coaching is helping another person reach higher levels of effectiveness by creating a dialogue that leads to awareness and action. Said differently, coaching is a two-way conversation in which a manager asks questions and provides support in a way that enables an employee to understand how they can make changes to be more effective for themselves, their manager, and their organization.