If you want your business to be successful, you need happy, engaged employees willing to do their best in order to achieve the company’s goals.
For such results, you need to nurture the right kind of culture in your work environment and make sure that everyone is getting the support they need to be their best selves and reach their potential. It’s also the culture in which a mistake is not considered a failure, but one of many attempts to solve a challenge.
To be able to grow such a culture, a business owner needs to be a true leader and the one who coaches their employees as well as motivates them to be creative and grow.
Here are some more specific reasons why every business owner needs to develop and polish their coaching skills.
Set Goals
A business owner needs to be able to set clear, well-defined and measurable goals in order to push their business in the right direction. Once they’re able to transform their vision into SMART goals, they will be able to improve their business.
On the other hand, goal setting is a skill that business owners should introduce to their workplace too and encourage their employees to learn and start practicing it.
A business owner with a solution-focused mindset will often ask their staff on how they plan to achieve their goals or help them transform their perceived problems into goals, and search for a solution.
Provide Feedback
When coaching your employees, you need to give adequate feedback on what’s working well and what is not.
This way your employees will learn how to best perform their tasks, while also being praised for the good work they are doing. Such an approach is especially important at the workplace, as employees who feel underappreciated given that they don’t receive any recognition for their work simply leave. Stats say that 36% of employees state the lack of recognition as their top reason for quitting their job. Providing feedback is also a key employee engagement strategy.
The best feedback to give is non-judgmental and observational. When it’s clear and specific, such feedback will be enough for your employees to evaluate their performance themselves and implement changes in order to reach desired goals.
Ask Questions
When coaching your employees, be prepared to ask many questions, as this is one of the best methods to stimulate them to look for solutions themselves and nurture their creativity and problem-solving skills. This way you won’t just direct them to use the techniques which are already being used but motivate them to look for their own methods and have their own ideas on how to get an issue solved.
When asking your employees questions, you can leverage the GROW model to structure your dialogue:
- G Ask your employees what they want to achieve.
- R Ask them about the details of the current situation.
- O Use open-ended questions to facilitate their skill of creative thinking and come up with alternatives.
- W Ask questions to decide on certain courses of action and establish criteria for success.
Sometimes your employees may surprise you and offer even better alternatives. If they come up with the same idea you’ve already had in your mind, it’s still a benefit, as your coachee will have a greater sense of ownership and commitment when putting the idea into practice.
Listen and Give Encouragement
A good coach will value the input they get from their coachees, and recognize when they need to be empowered to share their opinions and speak up.
As a business owner, you need adequate feedback from your employees too, as it can help you improve your own performance, and have a positive impact on the entire company.
Still, in order to be able to get sincere and open feedback, you need to have meaningful relationships with your employees so that they are sure that you will listen to what they have to say, rather than dismiss them.
A relevant study shows that employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more empowered to do their best work.
You can show that you are genuinely listening if you give your employees your undivided attention and engage in the discussion using the skill of active listening.
Change Your Perspective
To get the most out of coaching your employees, you need to know how to shift your perspective and see your employees’ performance through their own point of view.
Your every employee has their own personality, preferences, and motivations, and if you want to see them making positive changes and achieving their best results, you need to know exactly how to approach them and what to focus on during your coaching conversations.
This skill requires focusing on someone else other than yourself for a prolonged period of time, which can seem quite tiring at first.
But you’ll see how beneficial it is as walking in your employees’ shoes will help you offer them the understanding and support, they need to boost their performance.
Monitoring the Progress
Successful business owners will know when, what, and how to check in order to establish whether their coaching has resulted in desirable outcomes.
During your coaching conversation with your every employee, it’s important to check:
- Whether you understand what your employee is saying. Try rephrasing them.
- Whether your employee is happy with the planned course of activities. The verbal agreement with your employees is not enough if they are not enthusiastic about the action they need to take, so don’t overlook this step.
- Whether all important issues have been covered. Don’t presume you’ve tackled all that is relevant, so don’t forget to ask if there is something else that needs to be clarified.
- Whether your employee has taken action. Agree with your employees upon the way they will report to you about their actions and their results.
- Whether the goal is achieved. A task can sometimes be so absorbing that your employees might achieve the goals without being aware, or consider their job done when there are things that still need to be done.
The teams that get the best results have one thing in common – a good coach who recognizes the value of the team and the contribution of every single one of its members individually. This coach also knows how to boost their spirits when things get tough. Try to be that coach in your business and build a winning team.