Grow your Team by Coaching Employees – Build 5 Amazing Skills For Great Team Performance
Grow your team by coaching employees! There are loads of skills you should help your team build that will significantly increase overall team performance. Better team performance means better career prospects for you, the manager. A brilliant win-win. In this video I am explaining how to coach employees to build 5 incredibly valuable skills for great team performance.
Coaching your team is the most effective way to build their skills. Googles’ people analytics team discovered one-on-one coaching is the number one factor linked to great management. From my person experience, of being coached and coaching teams, I know coaching employees to build their skills is amazing for building team performance for multiple reasons including:
Grow your Team by Coaching Employees – Build 5 Amazing Skills For Great Team Performance
- Performance Improved problem solving skills
- Great decision making skills
- Successful project management skills
- Encouraging better teamwork
- Improved people management skills
- Coaching your team creates higher team engagement and motivation, leading directly to higher team performance.
- Offering bespoke development creates a more appealing deal in exchange for hard work from the team
- The team increases their skill levels, which means more is done in a shorter timeframe
- With increases skill levels, the team successfully overcomes a greater range of problems, which frees up manager time to reinvest back into further increasing team performance
Improving all of these skills in your team will make your job as a manager easier. Your team will be able to take on many of the tasks and responsibilities you look after. This frees up more of your time to reinvest into improving team performance. An example would be focusing more time on solving the tougher challenges the team faces, creating a better solution, and implementing it quicker. All very good news for you personally as a manager.
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Before we dive into improving the 5 skills in the team, a little about coaching. Coaching team members is not telling a person what to do but helping the employee to think through options and come up with their plan of action. Coaching employees is not acting as the expert but encouraging the employee to become an expert. The process of coaching is focused on the employee not you.
When you are coaching as a manager, you should spend most of your time in a combination of listening, asking questions, challenging, providing feedback, and asking for actions. Keep the ownership and responsibility with the person you are coaching.
The first way to Grow your team by coaching employees is to improve their problem solving skills
There are lots of different problems a team faces every day. At the easy end of the scale are problems that regularly occur which have low impact for which a known approach can be applied to solve the problem. These types of problems are a great place to start coaching problem solving skills.
At the other end of the scale are problems not encountered before, with a high impact to the team, which will require a bespoke solution to be designed in order to solve the problem. The best problem solvers typically tackle these types of problems – usually managers or small groups of experienced staff working together.
Think about the different problems your team faces – in terms of
- How simple to how complex is the problem faced
- Do you have a standard solution to apply to solve the problem or do you have to design a solution completely from scratch
- How big is the impact of the problem on the team and business
Match the difficulty of solving the problem and impact of the problem with the skills of team members. To build skills, keep increasing the complexity of the problem and the impact so that the person solving the problem is regularly stepping out of their comfort zone.
Problem Solving Skills
Coaching problem solving skills is asking questions to get the employee thinking in the right directions. Good coaching is providing a safety net, so team members know they won’t mess up. Coaching is not telling them the answers or solutions but leaving them to work out solutions to the problem AND being on hand to ensure the solutions they reach are good ones. Coach through asking questions to challenging their thinking, to push their thinking in different directions, and to ensure the solution can be practically implemented.
The more problems your team can solve, the less you have to solve, so you can focus more of your time on the really challenging problems. This increases the speed of work and results your team produces.
Improve Decision Making – the second way to grow your team by coaching employees
Set out clearly for each team member which decisions you expect them to make on their own, which ones they should make with you, and which ones you or others will make. Creating this framework increases control and the employees feeling of safety and reduces the risk of too many wrong decisions being made.
Start by asking team members to make the easier decisions which have low impact. Easier decisions are ones with an easy choice from obvious set of options available, or ones which are made regularly by you or others. Much harder decisions to make are those with lots of bad options, lots of possible right options, situations which are chaotic, or decisions that no-one has made before.
When coaching employees in decision making, be very careful not to make the decision for them. Coach the individuals to understand exactly what they are making a decision about. Asking questions to challenge their thinking and get them explaining their thinking is another great approach of coaching. Coach team members by asking questions about options and consequences they might have missed. Ask questions about the different impacts of the decision being made. Coaching employees to build decision making skills and confidence is providing encouragement and guidance without telling them what to do.
Even more important, is coaching employees through the actions and activities needed to implement the decisions they make.
Third, coach employees in Project Management
Project management skills are great to develop in your team. Projects successfully implement change and improvement. To remove problems being experienced by the team, to take advantage of opportunities, to increase efficiency and team performance, being able to successfully plan and deliver projects are a must as team.
The more people in your team that are confident and able to successfully manage projects, the more the team will be able to improve what they do and deliver. Great news for you and the team.
Start interested team members on small, easy to implement projects contained within the team, and progress them, step by step towards larger, more complex projects that impact departments and teams across the business.
By acting as a coach to multiple project managers rather than project managing each project yourself, you multiply your influence and impact, leveraging your time and effort. You help your team to deliver a lot more improvement while keeping yourself close to what is happening in each project. Being on hand to support and help as needed loans a lot of confidence and knowledge to the project managers.
Coach employees through working out what steps will be needed to create the desired results. Then coach employees through organising resources, managing office politics, the people problems they encounter, and how deal with suppliers and customers at different stages of the project. Coach team members by asking questions, challenging their thinking and plans and encouraging great ideas and solutions.
Encouraging employees though coaching to improve their project management skills, multiplies the improvements and results your team can deliver.
Fourth, grow your team by coaching employees to work better as a team
As a manager there is a lot you can do to encourage trust and communication in a team, which I view as essential ingredients for great teamwork. Set the example by extending trust to team members and communicating openly, honestly and frequently. This encourages team members to do the same.
Coaching Actions
Coaching employees to work better as a team might include actions like:
- Challenging team members to provide updates direct to other team members rather than via you
- Encourage team members to seek help from colleagues. Ask questions like “Have you spoken to XX about this? I know they have the time and have done this before. Let me know how you get on.”
- Delegate problems to be solved to two or more people to encourage collaboration and then coach the individuals or team through solving the problem as needed
- Coaching employees on how to give feedback and encouraging them to practice with their peers. You could ask “Yesterday, who did you give feedback to on a good result, action, behaviour or decision made?” followed by “Take me through what you said to them?”
- Encourage employees to give praise often and coach team members on how to praise in the most useful way. You could ask “What is the most useful bit of help a colleague has given you this week?” Followed by “How did you tell them you really appreciated their help?”
The more you encourage collaboration, colleagues helping each other, feedback, joint problem solving and any other actions that build trust and increase communication, the quicker teamwork will improve. Coaching helps equip your team members with the skills to perform better as a team, which will increase team output and performance.
Better teamwork generally means a nicer place for everyone to work plus better team performance. A very good outcome from coaching employees.
Fifth, Improved people management skills– coach this amazing skill set
Managing people well takes a lot of different skills used in the right way to help and encourage individuals do the best work they can. Becoming a good manager is both a personal and a professional journey. You are much more able to manage others well when you are very self-aware and able to manage yourself.
You can start developing people management skills in others well before they are officially managers. A couple of easy to implement ideas to get you started:
- Implement a buddy system pairing a more experience with less experience team members.
- On-the-job training new joiners and inexperienced staff requires similar people skills to management.
- Leading small project teams are great opportunities to develop people management skills
Coach employees by asking them about :
- How they might handle different situations, both actually experience and hypothetical,
- Ask what they might have done differently to improve the outcomes,
- Discuss what the other person might have felt during the situation,
- Ask what the individual felt during the situation and how they expressed that in their words and body language
When coaching employees, get them thinking about how they can help and support the people they are managing. Ask them how they can improve the clarity of direction they give. Ask how they can improve the environment in which the individuals they are looking after can work in. Finally, ask them questions to develop the employee’s self-awareness during this situations.
Take any opportunity in coaching employees to develop their people management skills.
In summary
Grow your team by coaching employees – to improve their skills, their approaches, their attitudes … in short everything that helps build a better, more enjoyable and more productive environment for everyone.
Coaching employees is not telling people stuff. Good coaching is helping the individual learn more quickly using their own thinking, ideas, skills and approach. Coaching is helping individuals overcome their self-imposed barriers to getting better. Taking a coaching approach takes more time in the short term yet produces massively better improvements in the medium to long term. For those interested and willing to learn, coaching employees is a great investment to make as a manager.
The better your team does, the better you do personally and professionally as a manager. Help your team improve in the most effective and quickest way possible.
As a quick recap, the 5 amazing skills for great team performance that I suggest you use a coaching approach for are:
- Improved problem solving skills
- Great decision making skills
- Successful project management
- Better teamwork
- Improved people management skills
If you have any question on “Grow your team by coaching employees – build 5 amazing skills for great team performance”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I view developing employees as an essential activity for any manager. Coaching increases the skills in the team so they can do more, faster and better. Coaching employees also improves trust, deepens relationships, increases motivation, increases ownership and ultimately increases team performance. Increased team performance is exactly what the company needs its managers to deliver and what it rewards.
The time and effort invested into coaching employees by the manager is repaid many times over in increased team performance. Why wouldn’t you coach as a manager?
