Coaching leadership is leadership that guides employees in the right direction and facilitates their growth in knowledge, skills, and abilities. This style of leadership increases employee engagement, and allows employees to further their potential contributions to your company. Those increased contributions may help the company’s bottom line through improved productivity and profits, and also may reduce the need to hire new employees to fill presently-unfilled roles (decreasing payroll costs).
So, what do you need to do? Well, we’re about to show you.
A Good Leader Listens First
Think you know it all? You don’t. Your employees (hopefully) have a firm grasp on their day-to-day duties. Not only that, but they know the peculiar intricacies of their jobs quite well. What machines have what quirks? What people do they need to talk to in order to get things done expeditiously? What ideas do they have to improve the product’s quality?
It may sound counter intuitive, but the best thing a coaching leader can do is listen. Find out the realities of daily life from your employees before you start ordering them around. Have them take you through their daily tasks and learn as much as you can about the “tricks” to getting things done.
We’re going to include another step in this: coaching leaders solicit feedback and advice from their employees. The employees know the system and how it works, which is valuable to you – but they’re also human beings. Humans love being heard. One of the fastest ways to improve engagement within a company is to give the employees a voice. If they have something to say, do your best to listen, and, if feasible, to implement their suggestions. If their ideas can’t be implemented, do your best to explain why, and sincerely thank them for providing input.
Provide Consistent Feedback
There’s nothing more frustrating than not knowing where you stand. Good employees want to know how they’re doing, and it’s a useful tool for coaching leaders, too. On that evaluation form, you have a goldmine of information. How have they been doing? Most importantly, what can they do to improve? Work with the employee to set clear, reasonable goals for the next quarter, and then update them periodically (every two weeks, or maybe every month) on their progress toward those goals.
It’s a win-win situation. The employee knows precisely what’s expected of them, and the manager has laid out clear-cut expectations to boost performance (and profitability!).
Give Your Employees Room to Grow
We touched on this in the introduction, but it’s important to allow your employees to grow within the organization. Make a list of the tasks that need attention in your company. Which tasks can be managed by the current skills set of your employees? Now, investigate related tasks and decide which to prioritize.
What you’re doing is sacrificing a bit of short-term productivity to create long-term learning. These new skills will offer the company and employees some flexibility. The more knowledge and skills they have, the more value they can add to the company. At the same time, that breadth of knowledge may make them more likely candidates for promotion.
It’s important that you sell your employees on the value it provides to them, as well as to the company. If employees see the personal benefit, they’ll be more likely to invest time in new skills and tasks.
At Hyper Growth Business Strategies we work with executives to help them hire the best candidates to and to empower current staff. If you’d like some guidance with team optimization, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our website and read more about Our Process and Our Services.