New supervisors often struggle with coaching the employees on their teams, and one of the reasons they often give for the struggle is that they don’t have time for or don’t know how to have the conversation. Many times, the challenge starts with the new supervisor thinking that a coaching conversation has to be a long, drawn-out meeting. The good news is that coaching can happen in many ways. A sit-down, face-to-face conversation in your office or conference room is one way to coach. And, it is not the only – or even preferred – way to coach.
Here are three ways you can coach your employees without making the conversation feel like a coaching conversation…
Have them Observe Another Person
Ask your employee to observe the wait staff at lunch, a cashier at the grocery store, a flight attendant on a plane, the members of the landscaping crew, or any other person in a role where they can watch the person’s actions and interactions with others. Then ask them to write down two or three things they can learn from this other person’s behaviors. For example,
- What did you like about how they interacted with people?
- What did you dislike about how they interacted with people?
- What did their body language say to you about what they think of their job?
- What did their tone and focus say to you about what they think of their job?
- Would you want to know that person better or work with them? Why? Or why not?
- What do you see in that person that they would either like to do or avoid doing?
You can follow this exercise by reviewing their observations with them and framing the conversation in terms of what you can both learn about providing better service, interacting with coworkers better, or some other framing that fits your situation.
Give them a Case Study or Situation to Evaluate
You can take a past situation that occurred in your environment or you can craft a situation statement for something that is likely to happen in your environment and then give it to your team for evaluation and comment. Ask them to individually assess the situation then get with one or two other people on your team to discuss ways to handle the situation; and then you can facilitate a group discussion with your whole team about different strategies for handling the case study situation.
Write them a Positive Note
The key with this approach is the word positive. This is really simple. All you have to do is observe your team’s behaviors until you see them do something that you’d like to see them repeat in the future. As soon as possible, leave them a hand-written note expressing your appreciation for their positive behavior. That’s it. Nothing complicated. Just two or three sentences describing what you noticed, why it’s important, and thanking them for doing it.
When you look carefully at these coaching techniques, you will see that they are not really “coaching” in the ways most people think of it. The techniques focus more on learning by the employee and reinforcing by the leader than they do on teaching by the leader and following by the employee.
As you work on developing your coaching skills, remember that the key to effective coaching is more about creating and reinforcing learning opportunities for your team than it is about teaching things to your team.
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