To be a True Leader | How to Coach Your Employees
To be a True Leader, How to Coach Your Employees? It is not enough just to do checks and audits and give advice. For this, you must directly develop and motivate your employees. Let’s look at how you can do this.
Leading your employees well also means that you need to coach well. If you lead well, you will perform well. Be sure that you will soon get the effects of coaching.
Coaching provided by professional coaches remains important and valuable, however, organizations are increasingly looking at on-the-job coaching as a vital tool for developing talent and achieving performance goals. Here you play a key role as managers.
As we’ve always said, while leaders are held accountable for developing others, few have coaching skills or know effective ways to coach others. So even though they give advice to their employees, they don’t really know how to have a coaching conversation with their employees.
That’s why it’s critical for leaders to learn how to be a coach To be a True Leader.
Contents
Use These 4 Essential Skills to Coach Your Employees To be a True Leader:
There is a lot of important information that I have learned thanks to the hundreds of managers and leaders I have been in contact with for many years, training and coaching. Whether you’re a professional coach or a leader with coaching responsibilities, I believe you need to improve your coaching skills, ability and relationship.
It will take time to learn and unlike some coaching models that can remain theoretical, you will be guided by 4 basic coaching skills (these coaching skills are adapted from the Better Conversations coaching program) and 4 key skills for coaching conversations:
- Listening carefully to Understand
- Asking Powerful and Effective Questions
- Being Challenging and Supportive
- Creating Next Steps and Accountability
Listening to Understand To be a True Leader!
Listening starts with focusing very carefully, repeating concepts to build understanding, and summarizing what you’ve heard. But listening to understand goes beyond these active listening techniques to coach others.
Listening to truly understand someone starts with acknowledging that more than one level of knowledge is conveyed in a conversation: facts, feelings, and values. Naturally, when you listen you pay attention to the facts being discussed. But listening to understand also means paying attention to other levels of listening. Listen to the values behind the topic you’re talking about, as well as the emotions people feel. Notice not only people’s words, but also their tone of voice, body language, beliefs, culture what seems most important to them. Listen to all three levels and really focus to understand people’s point of view.
Asking Powerful Questions
This is the ability to provide your employee with perspectives, as well as ask bold questions, advance conversation, and provoke new insights from them. Asking non-guiding questions that give more information and positively stretch people’s thinking is a learned skill that develops over time. Examples of powerful questions include below:
What else could you do?
Who else have you talked to about this?
Who else is affected in this case?
How do you want the rest of the team to feel about it?
Beyond building mutual understanding of the facts, asking powerful questions like this can help uncover untapped insights and unspoken reservations.
Being Challenging and Supportive To be a True Leader!
We all need to be challenged by our thinking and ideas from time to time. Difficulty can increase positive internal tension, enable productive dialogue, and uncover unexamined assumptions. It can lead to a stronger, shared, and result-producing understanding.
It’s about coaching your employees, getting them to try something different than they’ve done before, or creating a significant shift in perspective. Being positive questioning and challenging is about uncovering answers through openness and discovery, and often results in higher awareness.
But challenging someone is only effective when combined with the right amount of support. You have to show that you really listen to your employee and understand their feelings and values. You must also present the challenge in a safe environment. When taken too far or presented at the wrong moment and without adequate support, the compulsion can be misperceived and cause stress.
The challenge, when executed well, builds trust and promotes honesty and transparency rather than triggering the defensive side of the employee.
Determining Next Steps and Accountability To be a True Leader!
Having effective conversations is just one aspect of ensuring successful coaching. High performance results happen when insights are applied and new behaviors are tried. The ability to create accountability is about creating clear, specific, and meaningful actions and dialogs.
Connect conversations to action by creating next steps and action plans. For example, take the promise of the action “So, by Friday I’ll send you an email about how things are going” from your employee. These actions ensure that the value, insights, and decisions created by a well-done coaching are not lost.
Also Focus on Relationship to Coach Your Employees
Leaders can make the transformation happen even in 10 minutes of corridor talks. You may not need long conferences for this.
But creating the right relationship is crucial. You need to have a safe, reliable, and productive space for coaching conversations.
To be a True Leader, focus on increasing your self-awareness, showing flexibility and empathy, and creating the environment of psychological safety.
Once you have the tools and some practice with the 4 basic skills in your talent bag to be a true Leader, you’ll find that coaching conversations are an effective way to develop and motivate your employees. You will also develop; As you develop your coaching skills, you’ll find that you’ll develop leadership abilities that have benefits in other business relationships. A manager’s ability to build relationships, gain knowledge, challenge assumptions, support others, and clarify goals are important cornerstones on the path to leadership.