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Coaching the Coach
James DeSena, CSP To help managers improve their coaching skills, many organizations start with training. That's a good first step. To gain the greatest and the longest-lasting change, organizations should take several other steps that will reinforce and encourage the skills learned in the course.
Managers are usually rewarded based on results. For sales managers, that may be new customers or new revenues. For other managers, it may be projects completed or expense management. But to really encourage managers to coach, there needs to be a component of the reward system tied to coaching.
"Reinforcing training for managers often involves such steps as changing their compensation." the June 1999 issue of Sales and Marketing Management notes. They continue, "Instead of looking at revenue figures alone, upper-level management should consider such variables as employee retention, employee satisfaction, how frequently managers coach their people, and how quickly new sales reps are brought up to speed . . ."
Michael Le Bleouf, author of the Greatest Management Principle, says that "What gets rewarded gets done." When a part of a managers reward is tied to coaching employees to be successful, then the manager's behavior will change. Absent such a link to the reward system, managers will focus their attention where upper management does.
An audit department at a well known pharmaceutical and consumer company designed an employee development process. A major component of the process involved coaching. Unfortunately, there was no strong tie into reward. Upper management in that organization focused on completing quality audits and getting clients to make changes as a result of those audits. While the intention was to provide coaching prior to, during and after the audit, there just never seemed to be enough time. Coaching wasn't a high enough priority, and it wasn't a high enough priority because there was no direct reward for doing it. Some managers still did it. But the department wouldn't reach its potential until it became standard practice.
For coaches to be effective and successful, they not only need the skills to coach, they need the incentive to coach.
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