Chapter 5:
Coaching Your Team to Realize Their True Potential

Having come this far, you should be a confident leader with effective communication skills. As a result, your team are motivated by your example and loyal to you. However, with the best will and inspiration in the world, some members of the team are going to fall short of your expectations – and their own. The spirit is willing, but they don’t have the necessary skills, or maybe they don’t fully understand their role in the team structure. That’s when you need to step in and coach them so that they can fulfil your expectations and their own true potential.

Understand the difference between coaching and mentoring

SOME PEOPLE CONFUSE mentoring with coaching, so be clear of the difference in your mind. Mentoring is something any competent member of the team can do for another, less experienced member. Mentoring is a higher level of training, but coaching is something different altogether. It’s more customized, and tailored to the individual to bring out their particular skills, or enhance their abilities in a different direction.

Mentoring is more about on the job training and building general confidence and ability in the employee; coaching is about making full use of existing skills and taking the performance to a new level with specialized, individual training. The right coaching can empower employees, improving self confidence and interpersonal relationships, enhancing communication skills and boosting performance and productivity, which is, of course, the ultimate aim of coaching in a business environment.

Building on your coaching skills

LIKE MOST OF THE QUALITIES associated with good leaders, coaching skills can be learned and improved on. Good coaches are made, not born. Many of the general leadership qualities will also help you to become an effective coach to your team. Confidence, self-esteem, communication skills and approachability are the main attributes which will ensure that both your team and yourself benefit from coaching sessions.

You also need to be adaptable, open to change and receptive to feedback, because coaching is not like teaching, although hopefully everyone learns from the experience – including the coach. Coaching is more flexible – you are not teaching from a fixed syllabus, although there will be a number of general principles and basic concepts that need to be communicated to those you are coaching. Above all, the coach should not be a problem solver – he should help team members to resolve their own issues by increasing their knowledge and understanding of the job and themselves.

The most effective way to build on your coaching skills is to understand why coaching is necessary, and what the expected outcomes should be. Is it just about team building, or are you trying to address issues within the team or the individual? Maybe the problem is higher up the chain of command? It’s not always employee problems that create issues within the workplace. When you are clear on this, you can decide which of the various coaching strategies is necessary in particular situations.

Useful coaching tools

COACHING IS A FLEXIBLE discipline, and as such, you will need different tools in different coaching situations. These are some of the most useful, because they will cover most of the issues you need to deal with. As you become more proficient at coaching, you will develop your own methods, but understanding how to use these standard coaching tools will get you off to a good start.

• Use statistics. While coaching is individual, using data and statistics from current research and surveys can help you identify issues. You might wish to conduct an anonymous survey among your team, to gain some idea of their basic perceptions about the job, the work place, their colleagues and their superiors. Handled in the right way, this can be quite an eye opener, as well as providing valuable insights into how your team are thinking.
• Use Assessments. Used constructively, personality and behavioral tests can identify weaknesses and strengths in team members and provide you as a coach with insights into how to proceed. You’ll get an idea of areas where the team member is likely to be acceptable to change, as well as flagging up the non-negotiables. We’re talking properly formatted, scientifically researched assessments here – not fun quizzes lifted from Facebook, so choose your assessments with care, and devote plenty of time to analyzing the results.
• Listen and offer constructive guidance. Coaching is all about helping your team members to achieve their full potential so they can deliver the results you expect. Listen to their concerns, help them to differentiate between the important stuff and the things that can wait when they’re under pressure, and lead them out of their comfort zone with advice and recommendations. You’re not sanctioning against poor performance, your encouraging productivity.
• Offer alternatives and solutions. Coaching is a good way to empathize with your team members and find solutions to their concerns and issues at work, whether it’s to do with the job itself, colleagues, management or something else. There may be personal problems that are affecting their performance at work, and coaching can help with alternatives. It’s not counselling, but coaches need to be good listeners, and it may be that you can pick up on something that the team member doesn’t see because he’s too close to the situation.

These coaching tools will help you motivate and empower employees who are falling short of expectations in one area or more, but not every team member will benefit from or respond to coaching. Also, it’s time consuming, and it’s not guaranteed to get results, although various studies seem to indicate that coaching can often deliver better results than straightforward training, mentoring and disciplinary proceedings. Coaching helps members of the team who are falling short of expectations to analyze their performance and recognize where there are problems, before they formulate a plan to move forward and address issues. If you want to be an effective leader, you need to be an empathetic coach.