Coaching is one of the most powerful ways to improve employee performance that you can use as a team leader or manager. Once you know exactly how to coach someone effectively in the workplace you will discover that there are three distinct times that the power of coaching is most evident.

First: When you are faced with one – or more – new, inexperienced or poorly skilled team members. Coaching allows you to quickly and effectively enhance the skill-set of new, inexperienced or unskilled workers in a measured and focussed way.

You can focus on specific skills that are most critical to your day-to-day results in your own time frame, rather than having to wait weeks or months for an essential skill to be introduced in an external course or training program. And you can introduce your specific equipment, procedures or requirements at the same time as you are developing the skills, so no re-training is required.

Second: The special personal attention that coaching implies can be a powerful way to build employee motivation and develop a collaborative team culture. So when you are faced with an ‘attitude problem’ or a de-motivated employee try coaching to increase motivation. It can be far more effective than other ways of approaching this problem situation.

Finally: Use coaching to encourage your good employees or team members to become exceptional. This is one of the most beneficial uses of coaching yet it is often overlooked. Just because one of your people is doing well, don’t assume that they couldn’t do even better. With a little coaching they may become one of your most valued people, with just a little encouragement.

The secret to tapping the full power of coaching, and getting the best results from the coaching you do, lies in knowing how to coach quickly and effectively as well as being able to recognise when coaching will be worthwhile. But as a leader and manager when you know how to coach properly and use coaching in these types of situations you will be amazed at how team results and morale improves.

Leadership and management is already hard enough. You’d have to be crazy to miss using such a powerful, proven – and simple – tool as coaching when you face any of these three situations.

Learn how to easily and effectively coach employees in the workplace

Well, the short answer may be: “With that attitude you may not be the best person to coach anyone…”

The longer answer may require you to honestly answer the question: “How is management going for you?” If every employee reporting to you is delivering exceptionally good and consistent results and you are happy with the way things are, maybe you have everything sorted and you don’t need to bother with coaching…

However, if even some of your employees could do better, or if your best employees always seem to ‘up and go’ just when you’ve ‘broken them in’, maybe you might enjoy better results if you did things a little differently.

Coaching is a proven and effective leadership skill that delivers consistent improvements in employee results for those who know how to do it properly and use it well.

Unlike management tools which revolve around control and authority (which are very important when the circumstances require them), leadership tools like coaching rely on so called ‘soft skills’ to influence, inspire and encourage different attitudes, actions and understanding in the person being coached.

Really effective leaders and managers are able to distinguish between the situations that require a management approach and those where leadership will be more effective.

If unquestioning compliance with authority is required (a safety situation, for example) a management approach is appropriate. However, when we hope to achieve performance levels that are better than the minimum acceptable standard, a leadership approach will use positive motivation to produce exceptional results.

So once you recognise that some situations benefit more from a leadership approach than a management approach you will begin to see where coaching might be useful to improve employee results.

When you know how to do it properly, coaching can achieve three things that will ensure your people generate exceptional results:

1. Coaching can build skill levels in new and poorly skilled workers quickly and effectively.

2. Employees who lack motivation can be encouraged to willingly contribute their best through careful coaching.

3. Already good workers can be motivated, encouraged and skilled to perform even better, potentially becoming exceptional employees, and willingly delivering outstanding results.

Done properly, coaching is one of the most effective leadership tools you can have in your leadership and management toolkit to improve employee performance and boost motivation and morale. It is a skill worth developing.

If you aren’t using coaching effectively you aren’t getting the results you could be getting from everyone on your team. It’s as simple as that.

Learn how to easily and effectively coach employees in the workplace

One of the questions I’m often asked by leaders and managers about coaching a team member to improved performance is whether coaching is something that should always be done in private?

It’s an important question to consider because it leads to a critical distinction you need to make in your mind, and apply in your approach to coaching in the workplace, for it to be most effective.

Namely, that coaching is not the same thing as discipline or formal counselling for unacceptable performance or actions. A good leader creates a context where warnings and discipline are rare, but coaching is common.

When you know how to make coaching all members of your team a regular and normal part of your interaction with them, you will be much less likely to need to escalate things to the level of discipline or a formal warning.

If you are regularly coaching even your best employees it becomes a routine part of your whole team’s commitment to continuous improvement to be coached. If everyone expects to be coached and the coaching is done properly and regularly, coaching does not need to be done in private. It is a normal part of everyone’s day. Your employees will appreciate your coaching and respond well to it. It becomes a part of the team culture.

Of course there will always be some matters that may be better handled confidentially. Just as some other interactions with an individual on your team should be confidential, but as a general rule when you have established a receptive team culture and are coaching properly it isn’t something that you need to do in private.

So, learn how to coach properly and establish a receptive context for your coaching and it will not only be more effective, you can do it easily, openly and quickly and still reap fantastic results.

Learn how to easily and effectively coach employees in the workplace