When you ask managers how they develop employees, their first thought is of the courses or projects they offer. Not many managers use coaching skills to develop employees themselves. Yet one of the main reasons employees leave a company is that they are not satisfied with how they are managed.
Talent Management
Most managers still manage by exception, which means that they pay attention to employees only when their performance does not meet expectations. They want employees who are sufficiently competent and motivated when they join the organization that they won't need much care and attention. They are like gardeners who sow seeds and then leave them to grow or die on their own with no nurturing, weeding or watering.
Managers with this mindset are “doers” not managers. They may delegate well but they spend their time doing what most interests them and that is not often acting as a facilitator, broker or nurturer with people reporting to them. Today's urgency for better talent management demands more proactive employee management. There is now broad agreement that employees should play to their strengths if we want to get the most out of them and to help them reach their full potential.
The best managers realize that they can't succeed in the talent management game if they confine their attention to employee weaknesses. When weaknesses are the sole focus, employees feel unappreciated and demotivated because they are made to feel self-conscious about a few weaknesses. This undermines their confidence and motivates them to look elsewhere for a more satisfying place to work.
How to Develop Employees
Managers with strong coaching skills are good at using questions to draw solutions to problems out of their employees. They use every opportunity to ask employees questions like “What do you think?, “How would you deal with this situation?”, “What options do you see for addressing this issue and what are the pros and cons of your preferred option?”
Effective coaches know that they need to be catalysts who help employees think for themselves, that much of today's work is knowledge work. To get such work done through people, the key is to ask questions designed to stimulate thinking. Managers who like to be solution generators themselves are effectively disempowering their employees by continually offering their suggestions for how to solve problems. They feel good by scoring goals in this manner.
Benefits of Employee Coaching
Managers who are skilled employee coaches reap a number of benefits. First, they develop employees in every interaction they have with them. Second, they push ownership for issues downwards, hence making their own lives easier. Third, they create a more productive team with more potential successors for the organization. Fourth, by stimulating broader and deeper thinking, they are using a form of delegation that is the essence of today's knowledge work. Finally, by stimulating more thinking across their team, they raise the chances of more innovation, which is the main key to success in business today.
Mitch McCrimmon - I am a management assessment and coaching consultant with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario in 1975. I had a ...
