Make The Most Of Your Coaching Time
First-line managers have one of the most difficult jobs in any business. To put it simply, they usually have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it. Then, when you add responsibilities for coaching and developing employees, nearly every first-line manager faces a serious time management challenge.
But in most businesses, it’s still critical – and possible – to coach and develop on a regular basis. Here are five tips to help you make the most of your coaching time.
Schedule your coaching sessions in advance, and send out an agenda. Most managers would never conduct a meeting without an agenda. But when it comes to coaching sessions, it’s a different story. A clear agenda allows you and your employees to prepare in advance and make the most of your time together. And be sure to invite the employees to add those topics that they most want to cover. That’s an important first step in encouraging your people to become more responsible for their own development.
Make sure your employees have the latest metrics and performance information before the meeting. Companies that use performance management software (like Merced Performance Suite from our colleagues at Merced Systems) are making it possible for front-line employees to review current performance metrics on their own, without requiring a supervisor’s intervention. If you’re not currently using a system like that, be sure you provide the most recent performance metrics to your employees in advance. Otherwise, what could be a useful coaching dialogue becomes instead just a reporting session. Telling employees what they can and should be able to understand on their own can’t possibly be the best use of your coaching time.
Ask questions, listen carefully, and let your employees do most of the talking. Who is responsible for your employees’ performance and development – is it you, or is it your employees? If you want your people to take responsibility then they should also be doing most of the talking. As the coach, it’s up to you to ask powerful questions – and to listen carefully to what your employees say, how they say it, and what they don’t say. If you find yourself doing most of the talking remember the acronym WAIT and ask yourself Why Am I Talking?
Focus and prioritize. Coaches, by definition, are optimists. After all, if you didn’t think that your people had the potential to improve, why would you take time to coach them in the first place? When this inherent optimism combines with relatively infrequent coaching sessions, the outcome is often a desire to fix everything at once. That’s understandable but impractical. Most people – even your most committed employees – can only work on one or two things at a time. If you try to accomplish too much too soon you will overwhelm and discourage the people you’re trying to help. This is definitely a situation where less is more. One of the most valuable roles you can play is to help each employee focus on just on one or two things that can make the biggest difference in his/her performance and development.
Develop a coaching action plan and ask the employee to write it down. It was movie mogul Sam Goldwyn who famously noted that “an oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” The same is true of coaching plans. If you were conducting a project meeting you wouldn’t leave without a clear plan of who is going to do what, by when, and how you will follow up to ensure success. Why should a coaching session be any different? With a written plan, both you and your employees can track what you’re supposed to do and make sure that you do it. Of course, not everything that gets planned gets done. But what you don’t agree to in writing will rarely happen.
By applying these five tips you’ll be able to make the most of your coaching time – and improve your effectiveness and impact, too.
1 Comment
Clear, succinct and right on!