Good leadership is about more than just developing strategies and delegating tasks. Excellent leaders are skilled at helping others gain new skills and guiding them on a path that leads to performing better and reaching personal goals. When this aligns with organizational goals, everybody wins: Employees enjoy personal growth and a work environment that supports it, and organizations build a high-performing, engaged, and loyal workforce.
When leaders are actively invested in developing employees’ skills and competencies, they will see their efforts bear fruit. In addition to strong training and development programs, coaching plays a valuable role in developing and engaging talent day to day, leading to a broad range of benefits such as empowered employees, improved performance, and higher engagement.
Empowered Employees
Coaching helps empower employees to come up with solutions and implement their ideas. This benefits the organization because empowered employees know they have the freedom to be proactive and make decisions that will improve the company.
Higher Retention Rates
For many employees, it’s important to surround themselves with people who want to see them flourish. Providing a coach or mentor can significantly boost retention rates.
By nurturing your employees at work, you’ll help them feel happier and have more meaningful relationships across your organization.
Enhanced Performance
Do you have any employees who looked amazing on paper and flew through interviews with flying colours, but aren’t performing to the level you expected?
If so, coaching may be the answer to unlocking their talent and filling gaps in performance. Whether it’s a lack of guidance from management or an inability to see how their career could progress, even the most talented employees can suffer drops in performance from time to time.
Fosters Positive Communication
Adopting a conversational coaching style in your workplace encourages positive communication between all members of your organisation.
Whether it’s having honest discussions about any issues at work, or voicing ambitious ideas to board members, coaching makes it easier for employees to speak out and tackle issues head-on.
Coaching can be a valuable process for leaders to identify areas for improvement and take positive action today to avoid problems snowballing down the line.
Not only can a coaching style create a happy work environment between employees, but it also helps to build more meaningful relationships with clients and customers. Honest two-way conversations allow you to pinpoint customer/client concerns, as well as express your own ideas to improve your professional relationship.
Introducing Coaching to Your Organization
Implementing a coaching style across your organization won’t happen overnight.
Improving company culture and coaching communication skills is a step-by-step process which takes time and patience. Employees in senior leadership roles must lead by example if a culture of conversational coaching is to trickle down to all members of an organisation.
So, how do you go about implementing a company coaching programme?
Feedback is key
Coaching encourages employees at all levels to ask for feedback and take proactive action to improve their performance. Openness to constructive feedback promotes a healthy work environment where concerns are tackled head-on with positive solutions.
Ask for Help
Seeking assistance is an essential part of management but knowing how to ask for help (without seeming over-demanding) is a sophisticated skill which many people find difficult.
Conversational coaching hones your personal skills and helps you learn how to ask for help with a considerate and reasonable attitude.
Have honest conversations with co-workers about why you’re asking for assistance and why you would value their input. This helps to break-down unnecessary hierarchical barriers and create a level of empathy between colleagues.
Be Empathetic
Empathy is a two-way street so take the time to understand the other person’s position and find out how you can help.
Empathy can enhance your communication skills as it gives you a sense of what an individual wants, and whether or not they’re getting it from you.
The benefits of coaching extend beyond just increased engagement, better performance, and empowered employees. Developing leaders from within the organization helps build the leadership pipeline and grows institutional knowledge.
Leaders don’t automatically know how to be good coaches, but they can be taught with leadership development that offers practical strategies for coaching teams toward sustained performance improvement. Just like any other skill, coaching can be taught through experiential learning. It can also be honed over time through real-life practice and additional training to learn new techniques and approaches. If you want to empower employees, improve individual performance, and develop an engaged workforce, consider making an investment in developing coaches within your organization.
About Great Place to Work®
Great Place to Work® is the Global Authority on Workplace Culture. We make it easy to survey your employees, uncover actionable insights and get recognized for your great company culture. Learn more about Great Place to Work Certification.
