Coaching Skills and Employee Engagement
Leaders who are highly effective coaches have employees who are almost 8 times more engaged than…the worst coaches!
Even the difference between good coaches at the 50th percentile and great coaches (90th percentile) is vast.
Here are other results our research shows are produced by extraordinary coaches:
• 2.5 times higher levels of “satisfaction with my involvement in decisions that affect my work.”
• More than double the number of employees who were inspired to “put forth a great deal of effort every day.”
• Twice as high ratings of supervisor effectiveness.
• Half as many employees thinking about quitting.
• Dramatically higher levels of customer service and satisfaction.
We’ve also found that all known drivers of productivity can be increased through improved coaching. As the leading management thinker, Peter Drucker, observed “A 10% increase of productivity would double the profits of most organizations.”
With this high impact on results, coaching is often mislabelled as a “soft skill.” Coaching is a vital leadership skill that produces very hard and tangible results!
Mindset and Skill Set
Coaching represents both a mindset and a skill set. The mindset comes into play for leaders who have a choice in how they guide conversations with employees. Leaders can either direct their employees’ actions – in a fairly autocratic mode –or instead coach their employees to discover the best actions to take to move forward.
A manager’s mindset might be, ‘I can get more done by controlling and directing,’ whereas a coach’s mindset might be, ‘I can get more done by growing my employees and gaining their commitment.’
The mindset must precede the skill set. Unless a leader consciously chooses to coach – and chooses ‘growth’ as a worthy objective of the coaching process and conversations – he will be less likely to fully employ the array of skills that support coaching.
Cristina Madeira Certified Executive and Team Coach by
