How To Build Great Management Skills In Your Team Through Coaching
As a leader or manager, how do you build great management skills in your organisation? How do you encourage the coaching of great management skills, so you are developing the next generation of managers AND upskilling the managers you currently have?
Managers have the biggest impact on team performance and results. They can multiply team output and “profit” through increasing motivation, focusing work and effort on the most value creating activities, developing team capability and more. Managers can also destroy team motivation and output, by being heavy handed, by micromanaging, by stifling thinking, decision making and ownership.
How To Build Great Management Skills In Your Team Through Coaching
- 7 Skills To Coach Into Your Team
- How To Create a Development Culture In Teams
- The power of development Plans
- 4 Ways to Build Great Management Skills Through Coaching
As a business leader the common or obvious options are:
- Nurturing and developing management skills within your organisation
- Hiring in managers with “proven” ability to manage and lead
There are different pros and cons with each option.
Hiring in will cost you more – in recruitment and higher salaries. Hiring new talent requires you to find and attract that talent – not always easy. Then you take the risk that they can deliver what their CV and interview answers promise. You send the message to your current managers – you are not good enough yet for this role. You take a risk on fit and cultural alignment. When you hire in new skills, new ideas and new approaches which can be a source of organisational growth.
Developing management talent internally needs time, energy and resources dedicated to building leadership skills and experience. Home grown will protect the culture, continuity of staff and keep salary costs down. Development is a great talent retention tool. You send a great message that building valuable skills will be rewarded with opportunity to gain more skills. Greater skills in management roles usually means better team output and higher company profits.
Given than managers have the biggest impact on team performance of any staff member, investing some time and effort in improving the skills of managers produces improvements across the whole team. Improving manager skills has a leverage effect and should be the place you start with internal development programmes to get the best return for your investment.
Watch on YouTube
Listen on Podcast
7 Skills To Coach Into Your Team
To build great management skills in a business, focus on these 7 key skills for leaders, managers and high potential staff:
- Communication
- Relationship building
- Team management
- Problem solving
- Decision making
- Self-awareness
- Commercial skills
There are a ton of ways that you can help anyone build these skills. Firstly they need to know what to do and then they need to opportunity to use those skills again and again so they get better. I am sharing the tips and best practices I have used personally in improving management skills in others as part of building multiple high performing teams and what worked well in many top companies that I have worked in.
How To Create a Development Culture In Teams
To incentivise the coaching of great management skills create a development culture in teams
Changing a culture in a company, division or team must start from the top. If the leader of the group works at building a development culture, the rest of the group will follow when encouraged.
Actions to take to incentivise management skills coaching by managers include
- Make it a requirement that every team manager holds a weekly one-on-one meeting with their direct reports for 1 hour. This is an essential investment of time for any manager wanting to improve their team’s motivation, culture and performance.
- Teach team managers how they should use their one-on-one meetings to develop their managers and staff. I will include links to additional resources in description so do take a look at these
- Follow up regularly with your direct reports, and those managers or staff that report to your direct reports to check the 1-2-1 meeting are happening and they are focused on developing management skills.
If the feedback you are getting from more junior managers or staff members is not as positive as you expect or if the one-on-one meetings are not happening regularly, speak to the manager concerned. Keep pushing them until they book the meetings in and attend them. Keep coaching the managers to build their teaching, mentoring and coaching skills and their confidence.
To Build Great Management Skills in the business, create a skills development plan for each manager
Creating plans for how management skills are going to be improved incentivises line managers to invest their time in developing skills in their direct reports. A plan also creates measurable milestones for both manager and line manager to achieve and enables you to make both parties accountable for success.
A skills development plan should include:
- The skills improvement targeted
- Where those skills are now and what improvements should be gained in the period . Use objective milestones and progress measurement where possible
- The activities and projects the manager will undertake to use those skills consistently through the period
- The commitment from the line manager for coaching, resources and opportunity to develop the skills targeted
There are lots of ways you can measure progress. Here are some ideas:
Communication – feedback from colleagues, comparison of before and after, comparison against peers, contribution in meetings, presentation improvement, time spent listening.
Decision making – what types of decisions are being made before and after. What is the increase in the impact, complexity or difficulty of those decisions. Feedback from stakeholders. Look at the financial outcomes of decisions being made. Using anonymous staff surveys.
Team management – asking team members for feedback before and after. Using anonymous staff surveys. Observing the team. Comparing team progress against targets. Running through role plays with the manager and comparing output to feedback and observations.
Create skills development plans for your managers and regularly follow up to see the impact on their teams and the business from the investment to increase those management skills.
4 Ways to Build Great Management Skills Through Coaching
One of the best ways to experience coaching skills is to be coached yourself. Experiencing coaching gives you first hand knowledge of how it works and the differences to teaching and mentoring.
Teaching and mentoring pass on knowledge from an expert to a student. Coaching encourages the student to work out their own solutions. Coaching is great for building skills rather than passing on knowledge.
Managers often have good skills across a wide range of areas. You would not have promoted them or hired them into management positions if they didn’t have these skills. Coaching helps them use their skills in better ways, with better approaches and to produce better results.
For line managers to effectively build the 7 management skills previously suggested you should help your managers improve:
1 – Self-awareness
Becoming a good manager is a personal journey as much as a professional one. We follow leaders that can help us learn about and improve ourselves as much as our professional skills. We don’t willingly follow leaders that don’t understand themselves or who are not authentic. There are a lot of different tools to help managers learn about themselves – Insights, Myer Briggs, personality tests and more. Regular specific feedback is also invaluable. Use them to help your direct reports learn more about themselves.
2 – Questioning skills
Help your managers be curious. Encourage them to ask questions and respectfully challenge your thinking, ideas and solutions. Ask them questions to get them thinking about the why behind their actions. Get them practicing asking questions and encouraging their team to ask questions of them.
3 – Listening skills
Listening is half of communicating and listening is a vastly underrated skill. In management positions, where your job is people, listening is an essential skill to practice and use. Ask your mangers to practice active listening. That is hearing the words, taking in the message and then understanding the meaning of the message. Active listening takes work and concentration to do well.
4 – Demonstrate they care
Some of the best ways to show you care as a manager for your team is to spend time with them. Listen to them and act of their great ideas and solutions. Develop your team. Give everything you can to help your team be better and do better. Lead from the front and ask your managers to follow your lead with their managers.
Coaching is a skill set that encourages skilled individuals to create better solutions with their skills. Those solutions are better because the coach works in partnership with the person being coached, each party bringing their strengths together so two plus two does equal six.
in summary
How to encourage the coaching of great management skills in your team starts with how you interact with your own direct reports. Encourage your managers to develop great management skills in team members by spending time with their team and focus on growing these 7 skills:
- Communication
- Relationship building
- Team management
- Problem solving
- Decision making
- Self-awareness
- Commercial skills
Improve any and all of these skills, and you will have a more effective team member able to create additional value for any business. Improve these skills in a manager and get them to coach their team and you multiple the value creation by the size of their team. An amazing use of your time.
Don’t forget to take a look at the additional resources to help you build great management skills in your business.
If you have any questions on “How To Encourage The Coaching Of Great Management Skills In Your Team”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
As a manager and leader, I loved building great management skills in my team. As my better performers increased their management skills, my job got easier and easier PLUS the performance of the team overall kept increasing. This was brilliant for me and my career and just as good for those learning management skills.
Build great management skills whenever you can as a manager.
Build Management Expertise Years Faster
Access all our prize winning management expertise for you to stand out from your peers, increase your confidence and credibility and move your management career forward faster! We share a ton of content, e-books, help sheets and more to save you a ton of time while unlocking more of your manager potential. Click the link to find out more about the Management Skills Hub
Return To the Mgmt. Skills Hub
Course To Build Your Management Expertise
