Make Your Leaders Everyday Coaches

Make Your Leaders Everyday Coaches

Training managers to coach employees has been known to yield greater productivity and performance, yet many organizations lag in this respect. Here are tips to change that.

Organizations that are effective at training managers to coach employees have higher levels of employee productivity, employee engagement and financial performance, according to a November 2011 Bersin & Associates study titled “High-Impact Performance Management: Maximizing Performance Coaching.”

In fact, 73 percent of organizations that are highly effective at teaching coaching preparation also had above-average business results. Of the ones that were average at teaching coaching preparation, only 46 percent had strong business results.

Yet, work still needs to be done.

According to the study, many managers are inadequate at performance coaching, whereas senior leaders do not provide consistent coaching.

For coaching to be effective, organizations must create a coaching culture that supports each of these five conditions of individual development. Grab a pen and see how you rank:

by Allen Moore

“Using coaching instead of sending executives and managers to seminars two or three times a year can be more beneficial to ongoing career development, not to mention less expensive…”

PC Week

"48 executives surveyed about their experiences with personal coaches...there was almost unanimous agreement that having a coach helped in all aspects of life and enhanced both business and personal relationships."

Training Magazine

“Business coaching is attracting America’s top CEOs because, put simply, business coaching works. In fact, when asked for a conservative estimate of monetary payoff from the coaching they got… managers described an average return of more than $100,000, or about six times what the coaching had cost their companies.”

Fortune Magazine

“In a 2004 survey by Right Management consultants, 86 percent of companies said they used coaching to sharpen skills of individuals who have been identified as future organizational leaders.”

Harvard Business Review

“Xerox carried out several studies on coaching. They determined that in the absence of follow-up coaching to their training classes, 87% of the skills change brought about by the program was lost.”

Business Wire

“Coaching takes a holistic view of the individual: work, corporate values, personal needs and career development are made to work in synergy, not against one another.”

British Journal of Administrative Management

“Recent studies show business coaching and executive coaching to be the most effective means for achieving sustainable growth, change and development in the individual, group and organization.”

HR Monthly

“….many companies….offer coaching as a prerequisite to proven managers, in the understanding that everyone can benefit from a detached observer.”

“Career management coaches can identify missing skills or style difficulties and other pragmatic tips.”

New York Times

More executives are beginning to request the service for themselves…as the negative connotation of coaching as a form of punishment for poor performance is replaced by the growing perception that coaching can help an individual or group to build sustainable professional and personal skills, better learn, overcome challenges, reach stretch goals and integrate leadership training.

US Careers Journal

“The benefits of coaching appear to win over even the most cynical clients within just a few weeks.”

Money Magazine

"Executive coaches are not for the meek. They're for people who value unambiguous feedback. All coaches have one thing in common, it's that they are ruthlessly results-oriented."

Fast Company

"In a recent study, training alone improved leadership skills by 22%. When combined with Executive Coaching, improvement jumps to 77%.