The Coaching Manager Tweddle Group

Most people can agree that authenticity is of great value. We'd rather be - or follow - a leader who is for real than one who is faking it. Acting in a way that feels truthful, candid, and connected to who you really are is important, and is a leadership quality worth aspiring to.

Most of our team members want to be known by us. They want to know that they matter and that we care. As coaching leaders, we are looking for ways to inspire those we lead so that they can accomplish greater things and grow more than they could if they were not being coached. To accomplish this, we must work to find out what personal and professional goals our teammates have, what motivates them, what hurdles get in their way, what fears hold them back, or what bad habits derail them. We must really get to know them before we work on action plans, skills, knowledge and process if we want to have the highest probability of helping them to grow and perform at higher levels over the long haul. How well do you know those you are responsible for developing?

In the corporate milieu, we can leverage these findings to encourage strong showings among our employees. Our experience suggests that as a manager/coach, you can help your employees live up to their promise by adapting the five Olympic coaching principles in the following ways:

Ten management traps and how to avoid them.

Perhaps this book is one for the book club: However, as described by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee in Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, the effects on executive effectiveness are just as profound.

That sounds good!

May be a good video for our group to watch.

Pierce attributes that to "the emotional intelligence of people and the capacity to change" developed in PEP. But don't take his word for it. The data-obsessed Pierce commissioned a third path impact report on PEP. It came in glowing: 10-20% increase in employee satisfaction, 50% increase in employee collaboration, conflict management, and communication; 12% increase in customer satisfaction; and nearly three times the normal business impact.

For fun, try this. Close your eyes for a moment, and imagine yourself taking the point of view of one of your employees. Once you reach that point, ask yourself: "As an employee, what do I want?" Then take the time to ask yourself: "As an employee, what do I fear?"

Five Things Most Leaders Are In Denial About:

* What their employees know

* What their employees want

* Their control over their department

* The degree to which their employees trust and respect them

* Their own feelings of fear and powerlessness

If you're going to be a successful leader, you are going to have to learn how to ask good questions. Here are seven tips for taking this skill to the next level.

The steps you may want to follow are:

Work with your coachee on enunciating their values. What are the things that are really important to them? You could choose to use a psychometric instrument, but I find reflecting on key incidents and episodes in a coachee's life can be just as powerful.
Help them enunciate their purpose. Fundamentally, what is the reason for their existence? Watch out here. At a first try, a coachee may tend to put down a purpose that may not be very challenging and may cover only a part of what's important to them. Link the conversation here back to values and push your coachee towards a higher purpose existence statement-something that will really make a difference to the largest possible number of people and that has the power to energize your coachee even in really low times!
Draw the key areas that the coachee would like to focus on. What should they do (or indeed not do) to achieve the purpose? You might work with a finite time that the coachee is comfortable with here (I find coachees tend to choose a three-to-five year time frame most frequently). As always, stay with three-to-four key areas that broadly work towards moving the coachee meaningfully towards their purpose.
Work with your coachee around behavioral traits or behaviors that will align with their values and help them deliver on their purpose. Again, limit the coachee to key behaviors; getting the coachee to make a choice among key behaviors can, in itself, be a very powerful conversation.
Build systems of accountability to keep the coachee on track. These could be milestones or promises to individuals who are important to the coachee or a combination of both.

Your excuses are myriad. It's faster if I do it myself. I have a particular way I want things done. It's cheaper than paying someone to do it for me even if the results aren't the same. Whatever your reason, you're  stubbornly loathe to delegate even the most basic or the most time-consuming of undertakings. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool control freak, you may be reluctant to confront the true costs of refusing to delegate, but rest assured they exist. If you're hoarding responsibilities like a secret cache of white truffles, the person you're really hurting is yourself.