3 Tips to Coaching Your Employees to Be The Best They Can Be
As CEO, you’re responsible for the standard of excellence in your organization, which includes coaching your employees. The good news is that the right people want feedback. They want to do their roles well, be mentored, and be successful in their positions.
To help your employees be successful in their positions, you need to provide them with consistent and honest feedback that empowers them to get there.
Is your copywriter using verbiage that you think will not resonate with your core customer? Tell them. Could your salesperson improve their numbers by going through the scripts? Let them know. Could your employees on the floor reduce mistakes and improve efficiency by going through specific processes? Then coach them into those processes!
For this process to be most effective, it begins when an employee first joins the company and should continue throughout their tenure.
An extraordinary onboarding experience
A worthwhile onboarding process (which generally lasts 90 days) for any new person in your company needs to offer —
A warm and memorable welcome to the company;
An introduction to your core values, job training, company goals, and access to reference materials; and
A customized, follow-up training period to carry out through the rest of the first quarter to ensure that your employee is fully brought up to speed.
An exercise we employ as part of the onboarding process is the 8 x 3 ABF Matrix to foster networking relationship development. ABF stands for Ahead, Behind, Following, and the 8 x 3 refers to eight professional targets—six within the company, one at a competitor’s firm, and one at a firm from within the larger industry (that isn’t necessarily a direct competitor)—and three levels of relationships that the new hire will begin and develop throughout their 90-day onboarding period and beyond.
New hires generally don’t have an established network when they enter into a new organization, so this tool enables them to gain a true understanding of the landscape of leaders, peers, and subordinates within the organization. Additionally, it naturally fosters organic networking and, more importantly, enhances the mentor/mentee dynamic of walking beside each other rather than the mentee trailing behind.
The importance of continuous feedback
After that first 90-day period, continue coaching your employees to help them make small adjustments over time. The purpose of continuous feedback is to make little adjustments when opportunities present themselves before they accumulate into larger, harder-to-handle behaviors that are counter to company policies or values.
The best time to provide this feedback is throughout the projects employees are working on.
When you provide feedback, be careful to remember to start from a place of love and service, a key concept we discuss at length in our new book, The Mentorship Engine. Essentially, this concept is about leaders humbling ourselves in order to focus our thoughts and efforts on positively impacting the lives of others.
In part that translates to consistently providing candid feedback for your employees, coaching them, and tweaking their work, ultimately to serve them so that they can grow in your company. When you provide that feedback, do so with love—removing unnecessary harshness, while staying truthful to keep them accountable for their actions.
Quarterly coaching sessions provide time with your employees for more in-depth feedback so that they truly know the main area they need to focus on to grow and learn. In preparation for this feedback session, we recommend using a tool like the Job Scorecard (which we discuss in The Mentorship Engine).
Both you and the employee fill out the scorecard. Then, you and your employee will meet to candidly discuss each line item. When they deserve praise, give it. When they need to hear how to improve, let them know. If there’s a discrepancy in how you scored them and how they scored themselves, ask them to explain the score they made and come to a place of common understanding. Following this meeting, your employee should have a clear idea of how they can best improve.
The reality of coaching
The reality is that you cannot coach someone who doesn’t want to be coached, nor can you coach someone who doesn't want to learn and grow. But when you find someone with that Want To Factor™, you have a unique opportunity—and we would argue, obligation—as a leader to mentor that person and empower them to set and achieve lofty goals.
Someone who has this factor has grit, determination, and perseverance. They’re someone who has perhaps overcome significant obstacles and challenges to get where they are, which may not be immediately evident to you if you’re looking at where they went to school or what their test scores are.
A candidate with a high Want To Factor™ might have a lower GPA than another candidate, but that could be due to the fact that the first candidate had to work two jobs to go to school or care for an ailing family member in between study sessions. This doesn’t diminish the student with the higher GPA by any means, but this emphasizes the point that you have to look beyond what’s on paper.
By thoroughly considering the timeliness of coaching in your organization—through creating a stellar onboarding experience, providing continuous feedback, and coaching on a particular rhythm—you’ll set your employees and yourself up for success.
Achieving any goal without support from your team will be difficult. Providing coaching ensures that you’ll have the right team with the right capabilities to fulfill your short-term and long-term goals. To find out how the Mentorship Engine team can support you and your senior team, contact us today.