The Coaching Manager Tweddle Group

Really great article!

Chris's experience proves that not only can traditional leaders adjust their style, they absolutely should. It could very well be one of the best professional decisions of your career. Readers, I challenge you to ask yourself: what kind of leader am I? Am I a directive leader, am I compassionate - where do I fall on the spectrum? And most importantly, are you willing to do what it takes to adjust?

Here are five things lousy managers do when they should be leading and inspiring their teams:

Yup!

If you've ever had a truly great boss, you know how important they can be to a company's success. In fact, Gallup's 2015 report, "State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders," chalks up 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores to the quality of the respondents' bosses.

Great list!

One of the most important, leadership skills to develop in managers is the ability to coach effectively-including how to connect with employees and get the best out of them on an ongoing basis. From my own experience, here are three employee performance management best practices I've found effective in turning frontline managers into first-rate coaches.

"Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others." - Jack Welch

In my work as a performance strategist, I have found that at the core there are five principles that guide great performance in an individual: Mindset, perceived impact, challenge, effort, and enjoyment. These five principles are a distillation of all the latest psychological and social science research on what creates peak performance. Each of these principles get to the core of what creates real, honest and exceptional performance. These core principles are often not considered in the traditional performance review process.

When coaching such clients, I try to help them stay calm and grounded by focusing on making one immediate and powerful change: ask open-ended questions and avoid making directive statements. This strategy is simple, straightforward, and easy to remember. It's also measurable quantitatively. The manager (or someone observing the manager) can count how many times he or she asked open-ended questions and made directive statements during a meeting with direct reports. The ratio of the former to the latter should be high, often in the neighborhood of 10 to 1 as judged by my experience with clients who went on to succeed in management roles.

What Samar did was to ask people to share their perspective, without trying to convince them of hers. It sounds like something for a movie script, not necessarily practical advice for business leaders. But maybe it should be.

We all want to find meaning in what we do. As a manager, you can help your team members foster this inner sense of purpose by asking them a few simple questions:

When you're asked to give feedback on a fellow employee, you want it to be useful. But unless you connect it to what matters to them - and separate it from your personal beliefs and preferences - they won't be able to act on it. Emphasize facts, not interpretations.

These competencies all leverage individual skills and individual effectiveness. They are valued skills and make people more productive, but all except for the last one (collaboration) focus on the individual rather than the team. When we went back to our data, the skills that our analysis identified as making a great manager are much more other-focused:

Once employees know they're being approached about their work with respect-but also with consistently high expectations-they're likely to develop a comfortable, professional relationship with you, their manager.

From all the above it may feel like you're a slave to high performers as a manager and not they to you. Welcome to management in the Knowledge Economy. Better get used to it!

HBR STAFF/RICHARD NEWSTEAD/GETTY IMAGES
"Tell me about your career goals." How often have you said this to a person you're managing or mentoring, only to get a blank stare in return? Perhaps the person confides that they don't know what their goals should be, or even whether there are opportunities to advance at your company. How do you begin to provide support?

In our work consulting with companies and coaching leaders, we have found that if you're looking to develop particular EI strengths, it helps to consider areas for improvement others have identified along with the goals you want to achieve - and then to actively build habits in those areas rather than simply relying on understanding them conceptually.

To that end, start by asking yourself three questions:

As a CEO or leader, it's important to remember that your people usually know if something is not working. They just want to know whether you have the courage to tell them. By stepping up and being vulnerable you create a space that will allow your organization to get to the next level.