Managers and leaders are critical to the success of a business, and so are effective coaching skills. Consistent business team coaching helps with employee onboarding and retention, performance improvement, skill improvement, and knowledge transfer. On top of these benefits, coaching others is an effective method for reinforcing and transferring learning.
While there are many important leadership skills and competencies, coaching is central to improving the performance of entire teams.
A coaching leadership style proves to be much more effective with today’s employees than the more authoritarian styles that many business leaders operate under. Leaders who coach employees instead of commanding them can build a much more talented and agile workforce, which leads to a healthy and growing business.
Mentioned below are some tips for business team coaching:
Ask guiding questions
Open-ended, guiding questions lead to more detailed and thoughtful answers, which lead to more productive coaching conversations. Finally, you must develop strong relationships with your employees as a manager or leader. This will help you determine if your employees are curious, have the capacity to perform and improve, and what kind of attitude they have towards their work.
This is where communication skills and emotional intelligence come into play. Managers must guide conversations by asking questions and listening, not giving directives. Employees learn and grow the most when they uncover the answers themselves.
Recognize what’s going well
Coaching well requires a balance of criticism and praise. If your coaching conversations focus completely on what’s not working and what the employee has to do to change, that’s not motivating; it’s demoralizing.
Your recognition of the things your employee is doing well can be a springboard into how they can build from that to improve. We’re not talking about the compliment sandwich here, though, because that coaching technique often devolves into shallow praise that is insincere.
Giving compliments that you don’t mean can have a worse effect than not giving any at all, so take the time to think about things going well and let your employees know that you see and appreciate them.
Listen and empower
Business team coaching requires both encouragement and empowerment. As a manager and a leader, your job is to build one-on-one relationships with employees that improve performance.
Your employees are likely to have a lot of input, questions, and feedback. They need to know you care enough to listen to what they say, so encourage them to share their opinions.
Some employees will have no problem speaking their minds, while others will need a lot of encouragement before sharing an opinion with you openly. However, once they open up, be sure to respect those opinions by discussing them rather than dismissing them.
Understand their perspective
When you’re coaching employees to improve performance and engagement, approaching things from their perspective rather than your own will help you see the changes and results you want.
Everyone has different motivations, preferences, and personalities, so if you ask questions to help you understand where their “why” comes from and what their preferred “how” looks like, then you can tailor your coaching conversations to align the way they work best with the improvements you’re both aiming for.
These coaching tips will work with the business environment and help you have more mutually beneficial business team coaching to improve overall team performance.
