Coach Better Performance: For Real

“At Libby Wagner & Associates, we spend a lot of time working with leaders to provide them with practical, immediately usable skills for coaching their teams to achieve high trust and high performance. There are plenty of ideas out there for managing and supervising the work of others, but if these ideas don’t work, you’re wasting your time with someone else’s solution.”

Here are three challenges that arise when it comes to coaching and some practical, common-sense solutions you can implement today!

1. Find the right balance between praise and constructive feedback. Because we’re hard-wired to find the negative, and most people begin by diagnosing what’s wrong, manager feedback tends to be about what’s not working. This makes sense, right? Figure out what could be better and change it?
   
   Yes, and the pattern of focusing only on what’s wrong or negative isn’t going to get you what you want long-term because it’s not balanced. It’s a simple solution, but first, what’s going well? What behaviors or practices do you want them to maintain and keep consistent? Praise those first and do it specifically rather than cursorily.
   
   We use our Small Dose Feedback Tool to create an easy feedback structure. Whether you use the tool or not, the structure forces you to balance your feedback to increase effectiveness. What’s going well? What could be better? Answer these questions together to coach for better performance!
   

2. Encourage employees to acknowledge and address their obstacles. Feedback sessions should never be all about you and your opinion, even if you’re “right” about what needs to happen. When we treat our coaching sessions as passive for our team members, we actually encourage a compliance rather than a commitment culture. In the long term, this is more work for you and enables folks to wait around for feedback or direction.
   
   When we ask employees to self-assess, with specificity, using the same balanced approach as mentioned above, they can begin to self-correct and gain more autonomy. Even when organizations ask employees to do a self-assessment as part of their annual review process, this really isn’t enough, and it doesn’t help them internalize how to identify their own performance strengths and challenges or what might be both supporting them and getting in their way.
   
   Coach your team members by using facilitative questions, such as "What’s going well?" "What could be better?" and "What’s getting in the way of your making improvements or growing?" Oddly, and often, there are obstacles you don’t know about that you could help with right away! But because we don’t coach these critical thinking skills, we delay better performance.
   

3. Stay consistent in your follow-up and support. Sometimes, we are so relieved we finally have that productive, positive feedback session that we move on to the next ten things on our to-do list, only to realize a few weeks (or months!) later that we’ve not followed up or followed through on the agreements we made in coaching. It’s so important to set yourself, as the leader, up for success, too, by creating ways to be consistent in providing the right support and follow-up.
   
   Before you leave the coaching session, have a way to record any highlights, agreements, or follow-up actions for both of you. It’s easier, in the moment, to clarify and summarize what’s next and put a date/time on the calendar. Hopefully, you’re already committed to your regularly scheduled one-on-one sessions; if not, this is a good time to begin putting that into action.
   
   If you find that you are coaching the same person on the same issue or behaviors, take a look in the mirror first: Have you done your part? One thing I suggest is to ask yourself some important, honest questions about whether you’ve provided enough specificity, followed up with a short check-in, or followed through on the actions you promised. However, you keep track of these things, so it’s easy for you!

   We want our coaching efforts to work, so use these simple ideas to take your coaching and their performance to the next level of success!

   Want to talk about building a better team? I’d love to hear about yours! libbywagner@libbywagner.com