Coaching is a valuable skill that managers use when developing their people. It ensures they all perform to their best without telling them everything, because it’s vital to help them discover things for themselves.
The core activity of coaching is to ask questions that stimulate thinking and then listen a lot to help that thinking process, and this takes practice. With experience, it becomes easier and more effective. Managers are ideally placed to develop coaching as a way of enabling others, because the nature of their role is with people, and actively interacting with them regularly, helps to realise the huge potential in each of them.
There are four useful additions to the questions and listening elements of the coaching skill:-
Building Rapport
When you develop a close rapport with your people, you will find coaching much more comfortable, because you already have a developing partnership.
Suppose you have to utilise something as interactive as coaching, without any previous work on relationship building. In that case, it’s going to be much more challenging, so that why it’s essential to build rapport naturally and often.
The key here regular and consistent conversations – not all business-focused – showing you’re interested in them as individuals.
The Value of Trust
When there is a trusting culture in your team, you will be able to open a lot of doors that otherwise can remain shut.
Long-term trust is much more likely to help with an openness that will grow as relationships build. This openness is, in turn, great for getting to the bottom of challenging issues with people and letting them express themselves fully, so you can work closely with them.
As a manager, being trusted is one of the most vital qualities to enable you to manage effectively, whilst also helping your people to be of their very best.
Asking questions and being sensitive to understanding what trust means in the eyes of your employees is one of the most vital requirements for a manager’s own self-development too.
Noticing Skills
There is something else to work on that costs nothing, except a little tweak in your awareness. And it makes a big difference in how your people perceive you.
People want to know they are appreciated and that the work they do is seen and valued, because we all like to have what we do recognised, especially at work.
When we get recognised for good performance, even informally, we all appreciate the thanks given. So, as managers, we need to nurture our ability to notice opportunities to give praise authentically and as often as we can.
Walk the talk by creating a team culture in an encouraging, productive and supportive way, where everyone supports each other.
Leadership
The attitudes you demonstrate in the work you do are a vital element of the way you ‘get on’ with your people, and your leadership style needs to recognise the importance of putting others first and leveraging their capabilities.
It means letting go a little; enabling others and taking risks with them. Of course, be there to support, encourage and stretch them – and give up the complete control that you may be used to.
Leadership is about allowing yourself to be more relaxed, knowing that you have within you the capabilities to deliver success through your people.
Nothing replaces the core coaching skills of asking effective questions as well as listening closely to your people.
With these additional tactics, you can be even more productive.
