The Coaching Manager
The Coaching Manager
Becoming a manager
People usually become managers because they’re good at something other than managing. They perform well as a designers, perhaps, or as engineers, and they get promoted into roles where they oversee other designers and engineers. Once in a senior role, they face a new set of challenges, for it’s no longer their specialist abilities that matter the most — their skills as designers or engineers — but what they can do to unleash the abilities of their teams. This means developing three new sets of abilities.
- Managing a team. Managing is the transactional aspect of the senior role — making sure that goals, incentives and processes are all properly aligned and working to keep people on track. Most companies have systems in place that help with this function, so it is usually the easiest aspect of the senior role to learn. The new manager just has to make sure the systems are being implemented properly and handle issues as and when they arise.
- Leading a team. Leadership is about giving team members a clear sense of what they are doing and why. The manager needs to convey a compelling story, or vision, that shows why what the team is doing is important. Ideally that vision will connect with the team’s strategies and plans, and ideally the manager’s own behaviour will demonstrate what it means to push for meaningful success.
- Coaching a team. With both managing and leading, the manager transmits their understanding of how things should be done to the members of the team. But, when coaching, the manager guides their team members to see for themselves what courses of action they should follow and why.
The benefits of coaching
- Since, during coaching, team members have their own insights into what they might do and why, they typically become better motivated than any uncoached counterparts. This makes them more productive. It also improves staff retention.
- By solving problems for themselves, coached team members typically become more confident and more independent. They develop both as productive workers and as self-assured human beings.
- Every coachee has their own perspectives and their own understanding, so the coaching often reveals problems and solutions that the manager wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of.
- Coachees enjoy being heard and understood. So the coaching often builds a strong empathic bond between the manager-coach and their team members. It helps build a genuine sense of team.
Mastering the fundamentals
To coach their team members successfully, there are several things that the manager must learn to do. As in most areas of endeavour, what counts is getting the fundamentals right. If a manager masters the basics, their coaching will be effective.
Coaching works through the insights that coachees have during their coaching sessions. To have significant insights, coachees have to go beyond the type of thoughts they’d normally put into words. They must explore possibilities that they’ve never seriously considered and for this they must be comfortable. So manager-coaches have to be able to put people at ease and help them enter a frame of mind where they’ll be able to think creatively and express any idea that comes into their head.
The next skill the manger has to learn is the use of questions. In coaching, the coach’s questions direct the coachee’s attention to areas where fresh insight might prove useful. Open questions work best, for they invite the coachee to talk at length and explore possibilities freely.
Managers must also learn to listen attentively. They must become able to provide the coachee with a quality of attention that will support them in their thinking. The coachee needs to sense the coach’s goodwill and curiosity. As with the other coaching fundamentals, there are habits to build.
If a manager is to coach their team members successfully, the final thing they have to learn is how to structure their coaching sessions. They need to know how to open a session and how to settle on a suitable issue for exploration. In the middle part of the session, the manager must become able how to steer the investigation towards different aspects of the topic being explored, and then towards possible courses of action that the coachee might take. Finally, the manager must prompt the coachee to make clear action commitments. What steps will they take? And when will they take them?
Learning to coach
Any manager who is capable of summoning up sufficient goodwill and curiosity will be able coach effectively. They just have to learn coaching’s fundamentals and practice them till they can apply them successfully with their own team.
We have designed our level two coaching courses to meet this need and we can provide bespoke courses for any organisation that wants to offer high quality coach training to its staff. But there are also many other providers who deliver coach training for managers courses. There are plenty of options.
We believe that giving their managers coach training is a good investment for any organisation, whoever delivers that training. Staff retention improves. Productivity increases. And usually the managers learn things as they train and coach that contribute to their ability to execute the transactional aspects of management and that reveal what their team wants from them as a leader.
Coach training can make a big difference to managers. It can help them thrive in roles where it is no longer their abilities as designers or engineers that matter the most.
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