A Guide to Leadership Coaching, To Coach Your Team Better

With over 10,000 bits of data, a decade-long study, Google revealed among the top 5 skills required to be a a great manager, one of the skills was coaching. The question is, are managers, good coaches? We know some managers definitely are not.

Which means we have an important role to make these managers better coaches. So they can get a better performance from their team and also make work, fun.

Today we are talking about how to coach managers to become better coaches. If you haven’t considered coaching companies and corporations, let me tell you something… In the past years, coaching companies and coaching entrepreneurs has become a billion dollar industry.

Yes, corporate coaching has become more requested in the past few years and is becoming more and more mainstream. We have an opportunity ahead of us. If we can impact the workplace environment, we can change the world on a daily basis.

A single manager gaining coaching ability has a possibility of impacting 8 more lives. Here are the 3 areas where we need to make managers better coaches. First. Help them with their understanding of human beings.

Managers tend to study management principles, strategies, and forget the point of being a manager which is to lead people. Management is a title that is given to a leader of a division or a business. Leaders lead.

Leaders lead human beings. The understanding a manager really needs to build is how human beings work. How do they operate? What makes them tick? What makes them frustrated? What gets them to jump out of the bed every morning? Understanding human beings is the greatest skill a manager can have.

This skill is what they need to develop to coach their teams to deliver an optimal performance. Now, understanding what we do and why we do certain things is not as simple as the Kardashians make it sound.

It’s more complicated than that. Here is something that helped me a ton while I coaches my teams in my business. Align with your team members’ goal.

This simple trick is often forgotten. Most managers inspire and motivate their teams for the vision of the company or their own vision. Nothing wrong with that. Having a vision and riling up your troops for it is a great idea.

A better idea is to follow up by asking what are the goals of your team members and then aligning the company goals to their personal goals. When your team sees how they win when the company wins, you have a team that is inspired and motivated to get to the common goal.

Second key area to train and coach managers is language. We are so conditioned to say the things that we say in the way we say it that we often don’t see how sometimes what we say can hurt people.

There was a time as a leader, I would crack insensitive jokes. It was from my past conditioning. I wasn’t trying to hurt somebody but, as I would learn later in life, I was hurting people that I loved the most.

Language can define the type of leader you are. Here is a little hack that you can share with the managers you are coaching that will shift the way they use language. Shift from enforcing an opinion to asking for one.

James Beard award-winning Chef, Grant Achatz, learned a lesson in leadership when he lost his taste buds to cancer. Think about a Chef who couldn’t taste his own food. The lesson he learned made Alinea one of the top restaurants in the entire country.

Grant would draw pictures of possible food items he would share ideas of what he envisioned the food at Alinea may look like and his team was the one that finally brought it to life. Asking his team questions like, how can we float food?, allowed his team to come up with the famous Alinea’s balloon dessert.

If the managers shift their dialogue from “Here is the answer” to “What do you think could be an answer?,” the teams would shine, the managers would shine because they are leading from curiosity and interest towards their team members.

The third area of coaching skills that managers need is to be able to resolve conflict. Firstly, conflict is not necessarily bad. Conflicts happen on a daily basis and most of them are so small that you don’t need to pay any attention to it.

But sometimes, conflicts, if left unresolved, can lead to discontent, unhappiness, and can even impact the revenue of the company. It’s not the conflict that is the challenge, it’s unresolved conflict that is the challenge.

That distinction alone should help managers understand which conflicts to engage in and which ones not to engage in. Now, how do you resolve a conflict? Well, one way is how Michael from The Office does it.

Another way to deal with conflict is to understand where does it arrive from and how do you resolve it when it’s there. Most conflicts arise from lack of appreciation or lack of autonomy.

When managers fail to acknowledge team members or other team members fail to recognize efforts of other team members, tensions can arise. When these tensions are left unresolved, they can lead to conflict.

Same happens when a manager tries to manage a little too much. It takes away from the freedom of your team members and as the freedom goes away, we tend to build resentment because we feel like we can’t really use our capabilities.

A not-so-easy but kind-a easy way to resolve that is to have honest conversations. The way you show up, other team members of your team would show up the same way. If you are honest about appreciating your team members, if you are amicable and honest about your feedback to other team members, your team members would reciprocate the same.

Getting managers to become better coaches is one of the greatest values that you can add to companies that you serve. When managers do better, companies tend to make greater revenue, the team members are happier, and the workplace is a joyous place to be.

This one capability can help managers make workplace a happier place, which can lead to the world being a happier place. Let’s make our contribution and make managers better coaches. Source : Youtube