Coaching is a fundamental element in the performance management journey for a leader. It can help identify an employee’s strengths and highlight what areas they need to improve upon. From here, managers can use their coaching skills to address the developmental needs of their team and help them to gain the necessary skills to successfully move forward.
Lynda Gratton, CEO and Founder of HSM Advisory, touched upon this when discussing the idea of the overwhelmed manager who may feel as though they have lost their traditional place in the workplace since the pandemic and therefore needs to embrace the next phase of their role as manager. Gratton articulates that a manager’s traditional role has become obsolete, but their new role is essential for today’s organisations. She breaks down the fundamental shifts in their role in the following three ways.
- Move from Manager to People Leader
You can move away from the idea of simply being a manager of your team by embodying the role of people leader. This involves a power shift from thinking about how the work carried out by your team will benefit you to how it will benefit the organisation. Simply stated, it shifts your thinking from ‘me’ to ‘we’.
Instead of thinking ‘my team makes me successful’ try ‘I’m here to make my team successful’. Or ‘I’m rewarded for achieving business goals’ can be developed into thinking ‘I’m also rewarded for improving team engagement, inclusion and skills relevancy’.
2. Move from Overseer to Performance Coach
Instead of simply overseeing your employees’ work and daily tasks try becoming a performance coach that tracks outcomes. For example, try coaching your team and enabling them to achieve their potential and even invite their feedback on your own style of management as opposed to always assessing team members against expectations
3. Move from Physical to Digital
It goes without saying that the pandemic has changed the way we work. There is a larger focus on remote and hybrid working now than there ever was before. This changed the role of the traditional manager in an office setting whereby you managed an intact team of people in fixed jobs in physical workplaces. Teams are now more fluid, and a lot of the time communicate virtually.
Communication is the key to successful coaching, whether it is remote, hybrid or in an office. For example, reset your way of thinking with feedback. Instead of making goals and carrying out assessments annually, provide ongoing guidance on team priorities and give regular performance feedback.
Where to Next?…
To take managers on that journey, we can no longer rely on one off training programmes to bring the aspiration to reality. We need to embed it into every process and as they enter every process. If they are expected to give feedback or if they are entering a conversation with an employee in a regular check-in, the role of manager is to provide coaching tips at the point in time of when they are expected to perform each of these activities. This can remove stress from the situation and provide employees with the confidence to approach it.
It is fair to acknowledge that we often promote ‘players’, experts in their field with limited understanding of good people practice. They have a skill gap and a requirement to learn the skill of coaching before they can become true coaches to their team players.
Once off motivation moments or training programmes will have short term impacts, our role is to provide the learning now of relevance, before they enter the relevant conversation, so that they can build their capability quickly and it’s never been more needed than now.
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