5 Factors That Makes Coaching So Effective for Managers
Coaching is a very effective way to further develop your best staff – your managers and high performers. For nearly all businesses, your staff are your business. Your staff make the decisions, set direction, produce what you sell and so on. Your managers and high performers make the biggest impact on the success of your business. Generally speaking, the better your managers and high performers, the more successful the business.
I am sharing 5 key factors that makes coaching so effective for managers and high performers, why you should build coaching skills in all managers, and finally why confidentially becomes important when coaching senior managers.
5 Factors That Makes Coaching So Effective for Managers
- 5 key factors that makes coaching so effective for managers
- Why you should build coaching skills in all managers
- Why confidentially becomes important when coaching senior managers
Managing and leading others is a difficult and complex job. Every person in a team is different. Every situation faced is different – by a little or a lot. The range of skills needed to effectively lead is wide.
On top of all these challenges, the leaders’ mindset and approach make a big difference to how their teams work and deliver. Becoming a good leader and manager is very much a personal journey as well as a professional journey. How the manager views others, their assumptions, their life experiences, their values and their personality all help or hinder their ability to manage others. Coaching helps the individual change the personal factors that are hindering them as well as work on the professional skills to lead. This is one of factors that makes coaching so effective.
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5 key Factors that Makes Coaching So Effective for Managers and these are:
- Active development better engages managers to improve themselves
- Self-awareness and self-management are key factors in managing others and coaching works on both
- Coaching encourages taking responsibility and ownership – both vital to great management
- Being coached helps develop coaching skills in the individual
- Coaching is a very tailored development experience which targets the most important areas for each individual and does so in minimal time
Why each of these makes coaching so effective for managers and high performers.
1 – Solutions are Created by The Individual
Firstly, coaching is a one-on-one development approach which uses questions, challenge and feedback to get the individual thinking and solving their own problems. This is much more effective than training, because the solutions are created by the individual who has the best knowledge of the situation plus the solutions belong to the individual who needs to implement them. Coaching is a very active learning experience for the individual – they are doing most of the thinking and problem solving.
2 – Self Awareness & Self-Management make a Huge Difference
Secondly – the more self-aware you are as a person, the quicker and easier you will find it to change what you do to better motivate, engage and direct the staff you manage. If you are unable to self-manage, then how are you going to have the credibility to manage others. Coaching works on both these aspect through questioning, challenging and providing direct honest feedback.
3 – Increased Ownership and Responsibility
Third, because the coaching process uses the skills and experience of the individual to create solutions and because the individual created those solutions, their ownership and sense of responsibility for those solutions are very high. This massively improves the knowledge retention and implementation success of that solution.
4 – Develop coaching skills to use on the team
Fourth – experiencing coaching gives you a great opportunity to replicate and practice the skills and techniques on your team – that worked so well in helping you.
5 – a Very Tailored Development Approach
Finally, as coaching generally follows an agenda the individual sets, the development is tailored to exactly what the individual needs to learn, making the best use of time possible to improve their management and leadership ability.
All these reasons make coaching so effective for managers and high performers. These talented people already have the answers. Coaching enables them find the answers that they may not have found on their own or would have taken a lot longer to reach their answer.
When managers and high performers learn quicker and create better solutions, the business gains significant benefits.
Why you should build coaching skills in all managers
Coaching is not telling the other person stuff. Coaching is a development approach that uses questions to get the other person thinking, reflecting on what they have done and could do differently. The process of coaching helps them reflect on what is stopping them taking action or what they need to change to get better outcomes.
Because of the focus on helping the individual help themselves, coaching gets outcomes that more passive forms of development like training, reading or watching videos just can’t achieve.
Coaching is also very useful for helping others build skills. For example every serious athlete has a coach. By using coaching rather than telling team members stuff, you are better able to build in the other person:
- Problem solving skills
- Decision making skills
- People management skills
Problem solving, decision-making and people management skills are high value skills. With more of the team being better at these skills, the team will have more capability to deliver very effective solutions and results. The manager will have less pressure on them and be able to spread the burden of overcoming challenges and obstacles across the team.
By teaching your managers to use coaching skills with their team, you are expanding their management toolkit and helping them develop the next generation of leaders and managers in your business.
Building coaching skills in your managers will make them much more effective managers, particularly of high performing team members.
Why confidentially becomes important when coaching senior managers
Coaching creates the biggest improvements when the individual being coached feel comfortable revealing their weaknesses, their insecurities and their issues. When revealing the all their downsides, managers and leaders need to know they won’t be disadvantaged in a very competitive workplace.
If you are being coached by the person that is appraising your performance and deciding on whether you are promoted or not, chances are you are not going to be comfortable revealing many or any true weaknesses.
To overcome this challenge, arrange coaching by other non-line management staff such as HR team members who have coaching skills. This works well for middle management.
The pressures, challenges and competition senior managers face are even more extreme. Revealing a lot of your weaknesses and insecurities to those you lead or to those who you are in competition with, is generally very unattractive to senior managers.
For these reasons, use specialised external coaches to develop senior management. The complete confidentially external coaches bring plus the stronger coaching skills they develop through specialising in coaching, are both very valuable in developing senior managers. Help your senior managers get much needed feedback, challenge and development by using external coaches.
For more information on our coaching solutions for senior managers, please click on this link.
in summary
Coaching is very effective in further developing managers and high performers. These groups of individuals have the biggest impact on the success of a business. The better they are at their jobs, the more successful the company will be.
Coaching skills are extremely useful to help team members develop their own problem solving skills, decision making skills and people management skills. This is why all managers should be taught how to use coaching skills to get more from their teams.
The 5 key Factors that Makes Coaching So Effective for Managers are:
- Active development better engages managers to improve themselves
- Self-awareness and self-management are key factors in managing others and coaching works on both
- Coaching encourages taking responsibility and ownership – both vital to great management
- Being coached helps develop coaching skills in the individual
- Coaching is a very tailored development experience which targets the most important areas for each individual and does so in minimal time
If you have any questions on “5 Factors That Makes Coaching So Effective for Managers”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
The Author
I have spent literally thousands of hours coaching team members over a 20+ year management career is top companies and household names. On top of this I have spent hundreds of hours coaching board directors and senior managers in corporates to SMEs.
Coaching is a great development approach for senior leaders and managers because uses all the talents these individuals have and helps them solve their problems. This approach is really powerful.
The same approach should be used by managers in their teams when the other person has the knowledge and skills but perhaps not the confidence or discipline to turn these into valuable actions.
Learn more about what our coaching programmes offer for leadership and senior management
