The need for managers to coach team members is understood, but what is the real purpose of coaching in management? Employee coaching is not merely a development tool. It is a total repackaging of the manager’s role. Effective managers today see themselves more as coaches than as the decision makers of old.
Managers are buyers of services provided by employees reporting to them. Just like any business unit, managers are in the middle between their suppliers and their customers, internal and external. They will always need to make strategic decisions about how best to use the resources and suppliers available to them. The main difference today is that managers no longer have enough information or power to make all the decisions they used to make. Their employees or suppliers often have more information. This changes the balance of power but employees are also no longer so tied to one employer. Their power to walk means that managers have to work with them as partners not as bosses.
This is why managers need to be coaches. But coaching is a tool for facilitating good decisions as well as for developing people. Given that employees have information that managers lack and the power to resist imposed decisions, managers must find new ways of engaging employees to develop workable solutions. Also, the best decisions emerge through group brainstorming. Effective brainstorming can develop solutions when no one knows what to do independently.
Coaching Employees Effectively
Simply put, coaching means asking questions, not simply to gather facts but to elicit solutions, feelings, ideas and new thoughts out of the person being coached. If the objective is to develop employees, asking them questions challenges them to think harder and more broadly about issues, thereby enlarging their perspective and improving their reasoning skills. When the need is to make decisions, the same coaching skills can generate better solutions. The skill of coaching is in being able to ask questions that help people open up. Good questions are neutral rather than judgmental or critical. They help people see new angles on issues and explore new options for dealing with them. This means avoiding closed questions, those that contain the answer or which shut discussion down prematurely. Good coaches know how to draw more out of people by offering encouragement. They say things like “That’s interesting. Can you tell me more about that?” So-called active listening really means having the skills to draw more out of people than they might otherwise reveal or even know they had in them.
In addition to asking questions, the main coaching skills for managers include active listening, giving constructive feedback and knowing how to stretch employees without causing them to fail
