“You cannot manage men into battle. You manage things; you lead people.” - Grace Murray Hopper

Why all this talk of coaching employees rather than managing? There have been managers for years, so why the change to a coach? The two main reasons are:

- Global competition

- Technology

Issues cannot continue to get passed up the ladder and sometimes take days for a decision. Decisions need to be made quickly because today’s consumer is more demanding.

Thanks to technology, information is now easily available to us, and there is a lot of it. With all the information available today, the manager can no longer be expected to have all the answers.

On the other hand, in a coaching role, you are not expected to have all the answers. In a coaching role, you ask the questions and rely on your staff – who become the experts – to provide the information.

The result of global competition and increased information is that managers now must become coaches.

A job description of a manager is “controls, directs and supervises the day-to-day operations.”

A job description of a coach would be “leads, motivates, creates a vision and teaches staff the skills needed to empower them to help make us a successful and profitable company.”

There’s a real difference between those two descriptions.

What happens if managers and companies do not change? They will not survive. They will not attract the talent they need, since employees will no longer conform to complying with the orders issued by managers.

Today’s employees are more educated. They need to see the whole picture, and more importantly, to feel as if they have an impact on the whole.

What needs to happen? In essence, the annual performance review needs to be replaced with a simple, agile and iterative process supported by a coaching culture in which performance management becomes an integrated day-to-day process directly leading to business results and employee development throughout the year, as opposed to something that is done after the fact at the end of the year.

There are two elements: adopting a simple integrated process supported by coaching, and creating a coaching culture.

Creating a coaching culture is based on the concept that everyone in the organization gets coached on a regular basis. Most managers have weekly one-on-ones with their employees, and this leverages that time rather than creating additional meetings or work to be done. It creates a common language and common expectations.

Because everyone, including the manager and with any luck, the CEO, is getting coached, it is transformational rather than remedial. It begins with the mindset, “I am here. I want/need to be there – and a plan to do it.”

In its simplest form, it starts with employees soliciting feedback on their performance on a regular basis throughout the year. It could be after each sprint, a project or a quarterly, and the needs usually vary among different areas of the company. What works for sales probably does not work for engineering.

An organizational coach’s role is to ask the right questions and create new thinking in this area that makes sense for the organization.

Based on the feedback, employees, with coaching from their managers, identify three to four goals that are important for their success. They can be business or personal development goals, but they usually include both.

Employees make commitments as to what they are going to do for the next week, and then in the following week’s meeting, they hold themselves accountable for their results and their commitments.

If they don’t, talk about what prevented them from doing so. This is all captured in a pre- and post-meeting document that employees, not managers, complete.

Sound simple? It is. Why hasn’t it worked?

The shifting role of the manager

The manager’s role as a coach is to help employees create meaningful goals, affirm their successes and help them when they get stuck through effective coaching skills. This requires managers to have not only coaching training, but also a successful coaching relationship themselves.

This experience is the key to success, and it is where most coaching training and managers fail. Many coaches have designed and delivered coaching training to managers and sent managers to external coaching training with limited results. The reason?

Until managers have experienced a successful coaching relationship themselves, they cannot possibly serve as effective coaches. You have to experience it firsthand in order to recreate it.

A good coach can help you set bolder goals and accomplish them in less time than anyone can do alone. We see this all the time in coaching. People come with goals they think are going to take a lot of time to accomplish, but with professional-level coaching, they execute these goals more quickly than they initially imagine.

But for managers to be good coaches, they first must have a good coach themselves.

Getting started

Each organization is different, but it usually starts with a small group – a grassroots approach rather than a top-down edict. The group usually consists of a manager and his or her department, or a director and his or her managers.

A professional coach comes in and coaches the manager and the direct reports. This way, both the manager and the direct reports experience a successful coaching relationship with a professional coach.

After the successful completion of a program or set of goals, the managers receive training on how to be effective coaches themselves and take on the role going forward. The idea is for the managers to become self-sufficient in their role.

Usually after about six months, the managers are ready for advanced training, and the organizational coach is available as a resource.

Some companies adopt “peer coaches” instead of manager coaches. This is an interesting concept that could work in some environments.

What typically happens with this bottoms-up approach is word gets around, and other managers and departments want in, especially when managers find out this is an alternative to doing an annual review.

The goal is to create a coaching culture using a simple process. Assessments are done throughout the year when it makes sense, and they form the basis of goals. Employees create documentation as part of the weekly one-on-one, course corrections happen in a timely manner, results improve, employees grow and develop and the separate annual review? It becomes extinct.

Deborah Huyer has more than 20 years of experience as an HR leader, a business manager, an entrepreneur and a consultant, giving her the ability to effectively coach her clients to higher levels of performance and success. A provider of results-oriented coaching and organizational consulting, Huyer brings a rare combination of business management experience and HR leadership to early-stage and rapid-growth companies.

Alicia Marie Fruin brings a wide range of experience to coaching. For more than 10 years, she has coached managers, presidents and salespeople in how to build a business truly worth having. She has been instrumental in the success of other business coaches through her relentless focus on mastering the basics of coaching and business.

For more information, visit www.peoplebizinc.com.