Building A Winning Team: A Great Team Needs a Great Coach

Attention HR folks, this article is meant for you to share with managers in your organization who want to become the best leaders they can be.

Coaching shouldn’t just be about doing today’s job. You should also help employees think about their career path and enable them to grow in their existing role, move laterally to a new role, or move up to a bigger role.

It Starts with Your Heart

Do you genuinely care about your team? You cannot be a great coach without heart. If you don’t genuinely care about people - if you are coldly tactical and distantly technical and efficiently process-oriented and leave your heart out of it, then your people will follow you only part of the way. They need to believe that, by following you, they will go places they would not even see without you at the helm.

So sure, one reason you coach is to improve productivity, but at heart, it’s about heart. This is all about humans, so connect to your team members on a human-to-human level when you begin to coach. If you connect well, then you’ll be able to get the most out of your workforce. Many managers do not. 

Why It Can Be Hard to Start with your Heart

We expect that you agree that it’s sensible to “start with your heart.” We all want to be open, transparent, honest, and humble. Unfortunately, that can be hard to do. Managers often feel they have to take on a certain persona as a leader and that ends up making them less than fully authentic. Managers might worry that they won’t be able to say the right things or give the right impressions. Some managers suffer from “imposter syndrome” where they feel they are not fully qualified for the role, and they’re afraid that if they are open and authentic, then they’ll be called out.

There are many reasons why coaching from the heart can be hard. At this point, the most important focus should be on why it might be hard for you personally and what you can do about it. So ask yourself these questions:
 

• How comfortable are you coaching your employees?
• What might be hindering you from being open?
• How can you make at least one little step towards overcoming the barriers that prevent you from coaching from the heart?

How to Coach

True or false, no one has time to do coaching? (Especially you.) If you said “true,” we’ll give you a half-mark if you meant, “I don’t have time to sit down with employees for hour-long sessions helping them figure out their life.” You only get half a point because that’s not how effective coaching by managers works. Coaching by managers should be in continuous and ongoing short sessions.

Coaching from a Distance

If your employees are in a different location, working from home or on the road, then coaching simply requires some different methods than in a face-to-face setting. The principles are the same; it’s just that you can’t pop into the cab of a truck barreling down the interstate to ask a driver, “What’s on your mind?”

The solution to this is two-fold. First, there are the obvious methods: phone calls, text messaging, video conferencing, and occasional visits. The second part is harder and really depends on your commitment to improving performance. 

The second part is making time to coach people who are out of your sightline. It’s relatively easy to find opportunities to coach someone you walk by five times a day. Those kinds of opportunities don’t spontaneously occur for people who are not in your location. You’ll have to build a schedule of check-in communications, and use those as opportunities to coach. That discipline is what will make you a spectacularly successful manager.

Take a Moment to Reflect on your Coaching Skills

As always, just a little self-reflection can go a long way to improving your management skills. 

Ask yourself the following:
 

• How can you coach your team to achieve team and company goals?
• What is your current coaching style (if you have one)?
• Is your present coaching style effective? If you believe so, what evidence reveals this?
• If not, what can you change about your approach to make it more effective?

Being Fair in Coaching

Who do you spend the most time coaching? Is it the employees you don’t like? Is it employees you don’t feel really comfortable around? Unless you are some kind of saint, this won’t be the case. (If you are a saint, feel free to skip to the next section.) 

Be careful that you use your coaching time fairly. We say ‘fairly’ instead of ‘equally’ because there are some people who benefit much more from coaching than others, and you want the highest return on investment in your coaching time. We can’t give you a formula for fairness; only you can look at your own behavior to see if some employees are being overlooked.

Career Pathing (looking ahead)

There should be a natural step from coaching employees about how to do their existing job and coaching them for their next job. Yes, they love working for you now, but they may not want to work for you forever. Most employees have ambitions of moving up the ladder at least a rung or two. As a manager, you owe it to them to help with that process. Hey, it may feel as if you are shooting yourself in the foot to help one of your good employees move to a new role, but not to worry. If you show an employee you care about their career, they are more motivated and more productive.

Besides, most will not work for you forever whether or not you do career coaching, so you might as well try to help them move up or laterally within your organization rather than looking for opportunities elsewhere. A great manager is one who coaches their team members to one day replace them! (Or who helps them get where they want to go in their career.)

The Nature of Career Paths

Think about careers. How often do they progress in a series of straightforward, predictable steps? How often do new opportunities arise in totally unexpected ways? Since so much in life is unpredictable, you will not be able to give a clear career map for most employees. You are likely to find that you will have three main categories of employees:

1. Employees in roles where the next step in their career is pretty clear 
2. Employees where the next step is clear but getting there appears unlikely
3. Employees where you have no clue what their next step up could be

The first category, the clear ones, includes employees that have a pretty traditional career path where there is an existing job ladder. Job ladders are quite common. There might be a path of Junior Clerk to Clerk to Senior Clerk. In this case, it’s pretty easy for you to explain to an employee what they need to do to progress.

The second category, where making the next step up is unlikely, will be harder for you to deal  with. It might be the case that there is a clear path such as store clerk to store assistant manager to store manager. However, there may be twenty store clerks and only one assistant manager, so few will make it up to that next rung. Sure, you can talk to your twenty store clerks about this career path, but most will recognize that it’s not particularly realistic. 

The third category, the unclear ones, are jobs where there is no obvious next step. Maybe you have a forklift driver and you can’t think of a bigger job this person would ever be qualified for—unless it’s driving a bigger forklift (and you don’t have any bigger forklifts).

How To Coach Employees on Career Paths

Where your employees are on a job ladder, it’s not too hard to manage coaching conversations. You do need to have a discussion with them about their career interests (which may not be on the ladder); you do need to explain what it takes to move up to the next step, and you do need to support them in acquiring the skills. Okay, you know all that, we’ll leave you to it. Go and schedule some career discussions if you’ve not done so.

For the jobs with no obvious career ladder, you need to take a slightly different tactic. Again, start with the conversation. What are your ambitions? What do you like doing? What are your interests? Be honest with them that either there are no obvious next steps or the competition for that next step is fierce, but tell them you’ll work with them to figure it out. Think about extra projects they could take on; introduce them to managers in other departments where they might be a lateral move; encourage them to explore their interests and learn more about other jobs in the company.

The reality of careers is that many moves are lateral, opportunistic and some are wildly unexpected. You can’t hand an employee a career path on a silver platter, but you can be encouraging, inventive, and supportive.

All you have to do is have conversations with your employees about their career interests, and then do your best to help them explore ways to get ahead. It’s their career; they’ll figure it out, but as their manager, you should be a source of ideas and support. 

Thinking Outside the Box

One of the barriers to having meaningful career discussions is that we think inside the box of “What is the next job up in this department?” That problem is too large for that little box. We’re gonna need a bigger box! The bigger box includes project work, volunteer work at a charitable  organization, and temporary lateral moves. All those things can be options for moving someone towards their career goals.

Another barrier to meaningful discussions is that employees don’t have a good idea of what they want or what options exist. Those same tactics of getting people involved in things that are new to them (projects, charitable work, etc.) will help people see new possibilities for their life and career.

If you approach career discussions as a process of discovery, it’s a lot more fun than if you think you need to specify exactly how and when an employee will get their next promotion.

Being Fair in Career Discussions

There is a problem with discussing careers with your employees. It is a place where subtle (or sometimes not so subtle!) biases can run rampant. Do you tell the good looking young employee with the nice suit that they could well be the next CEO? Do you tell the hard-working person from a poor family that they might enjoy a lateral move, but only after they’ve proven themselves?

So let’s take an unpleasant moment of self-reflection. Think about each of your employees and what potential career path you see each taking. Now think about how much that assessment of potential is based on superficial aspects of their style, background, or personality? If you are like most humans, superficial matters often play a big role in your view of someone’s potential. But in the end, you won’t be like most managers; you’ll be one of the really good ones.

The main trick here is not to presume too much in your discussion about careers. Use a coaching mindset and ask a lot of questions. Answer their questions. Encourage them to strive to achieve what they want. Your job is to help each individual be their best. You don’t need to predict how high (or in which direction) they will go. 

Take a Moment To Reflect on your Ability to Coach Career Pathing

Are you doing a great job of helping employees navigate their careers? Maybe not, many managers struggle with this. Here are some questions to help you improve your approach:
 

• List each of your employees. When was the last time you had a brief chat about their career goals?
• How effectively do you feel you help your team navigate their career paths to meet their career goals?
• Can you think of creative ways to help people move towards their career goals?
• What creative ways can you think of to help people broaden their horizons and discover new career goals?

This article is an excerpt from HR.com’s book HR Fundamentals for Non HR Managers which is part of the reading materials for the course HR for Non HR Managers. This course was developed to enhance a manager’s partnership with HR, improve team performance and avoid headaches in complying with national, regional, and local labor laws, or as we like to put it, “the stuff that your HR department wishes you knew or wishes you were doing as a manager”.
 

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