A coaching leadership approach has a stigma of being a remedial process to address low performance that takes too much of managers’ time. But coaching should instead be seen as an approach to create growth, results, and opportunity across your organization. The business case for creating a coaching culture where coaching is practiced at all levels of the organization is multidimensional. It has powerful benefits for individual team members, managers, and the organization.
Team Member Benefits
Leadership coaching can benefit individual team members in many ways. One of the strongest benefits is in career and skill development. This is probably the most common scenario for coaching, as both employee and manager are usually motivated to engage on this and it avoids the threat of confrontation. Additionally, a coaching approach helps team members become more autonomous and independent. By asking them for their own ideas and guiding them to solve their own problems, they feel more respected, have higher motivation and increased job satisfaction.
Google conducted a research project with their employees to determine the desired qualities in their managers. Google’s Project Oxygen identified coaching as the top competency that employees wanted in management. Technical expertise scored lower on the list of desired manager competencies. This connects with my observations from many years of employee surveys, roundtables, and one-on-ones. Team members value HOW you interact with them more than what you know. Unfortunately, individual contributors are often promoted into management for their subject matter expertise, not for how effectively they lead team members. I’ve been guilty of promoting excellent engineers and problem solvers into the management ranks and found later that they didn’t have the skills or aptitude to lead people effectively.
Manager Benefits
There are several benefits for managers who adopt a coaching style. Coaching allows them to take a collaborative approach with their team members. For most managers, this is more fulfilling than a directive, command-and-control approach. It allows the manager to be more creative. Coaching emphasizes building trust and relationships with team members. I enjoyed walking to Starbucks during coaching sessions and getting to know my team members better. Because coaching develops more self-sufficient team members, you’ll be able to spend more time helping them drive improvements and less of your time on the day-to-day issues.
Coaching also provides increased accountability that helps managers in the performance evaluation process. I found that the feedback from regular coaching sessions dramatically improved performance management. It provided more focus on feedback and less on compliance to our HR processes. It avoids surprises with team members at the end of the year. One of the personal rewards I found in coaching is seeing team members grow professionally and achieve their career ambitions. Another benefit from coaching is that it can expand your sphere of influence through connections you make during the coaching process.
Organizational Benefits
The advantages for an organization in achieving a coaching culture is well established. Empowering employees to solve their own problems rather than just telling them what to do will activate untapped productivity and innovation. A coaching leadership culture is an important element of creating a learning organization, focusing on team members’ growth and development. A coaching culture not only increases business performance and employee engagement, but it also improves retention. It creates a favorable image and reputation of the organization, which in turn, attracts talent.
If your organization is to be successful in moving toward a coaching leadership approach, managers at all levels will need to buy-in to the benefits. Coaching takes time and work, and it may stretch some managers out of their comfort zone. The benefits to their team members, to themselves, and to the organization need to be shared and recognized. Without the motivation to embark on a coaching approach, it’s easy to resort back to the familiar command and control approach.
As you start to use coaching in your leadership style, connect with fellow managers who are doing the same and share some of the benefits and learnings that you encounter. This will help build early momentum in transitioning to a coaching culture that can transform your team and your company. For more information on the benefits of a coaching culture and how it benefitted Microsoft, check out this article from the Harvard Business Review: The Leader as Coach (hbr.org)