You're a Manager - But are You a Coach to Your Team?
Hello all. Thought I’d take a few mins to continue my series on leadership.
This one is about management and in particular, how management is a distinct skill from the oft-used discipline of “coaching”.
We hear a lot about management. About what makes a great manager, what makes a bad manager and how to develop your own management skills. And that’s important. Effective managers are vital to the success of a firm and also to developing and maintaining a cohesive team. In fact I’ve often seen that people don’t usually leave jobs, they leave managers.
We also hear a lot about coaching. Managers are encouraged to act as coaches to get the best from their teams, but often the specific skills involved in coaching are sometimes not fully understood. The terms “managing” and “coaching” are also often used interchangeably, incorrectly in my opinion.
Managing refers to the task of overseeing the work of others, be that a team or a project.
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Typically we see management responsibilities as
- Delegating tasks and work items
- Providing feedback
- Monitoring performance
- Onboarding and orienting new staff
- Resolving conflicts
- Resource planning
- Status reporting and tracking
That’s very different from coaching. Coaching is much more of a two-way process between the coach and the employee which aims to implement and refine a framework that empowers the employee to develop their own skills in the areas of attitude, judgement, motivation and emotional intelligence.
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Great coaches excel at the following
- Listening, absorbing and understanding points of view
- Asking probing but open-ended questions that encourage the employee to think
- Providing feedback
- Fostering behavioural change, initiated by the employee
- Showing empathy and high emotional intelligence
- Recognizing strengths and focusing energy on refinement
- Helping the employee develop a natural support framework
I always think of my role as a coach first and a manager second. Sure we need to get the job done, and management skills are critical to that, but it’s also vital for me to develop a team that feels empowered to take charge of their own career. Coaching helps people to build those critical frameworks to self-support and self-manage, which gives the employee a much greater sense of satisfaction than merely following management direction. Seeing individuals join a team and then using coaching techniques to develop that person is one of the most satisfying aspects of my role, especially if that person then begins to naturally coach other team members or peers.
So I’d always encourage managers to have a strong focus on the coaching aspects of their role. Managing people enables them to get the job done, but coaching people develops the leaders of tomorrow.
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