Manager as Coach

August 16, 2018

Making progress at something personally meaningful is the most powerful and motivating condition you can have at work. As a manager in charge of others, you should develop your coaching skills in order to help them experience this progress.

According to research, the single most important managerial competency that separates highly effective managers from average ones is coaching. And all managers—like directors and senior executives—are now expected to coach their direct reports.

However, while 73 percent of managers had some form of coaching training, according to research in 2006 from the leadership development firm BlessingWhite, only 23 percent of those being coached thought that the coaching had a significant impact on their performance or job satisfaction. Ten percent stated that the coaching they were getting was actually having a negative effect.

Clearly there’s a need to improve the quality of coaching training if managers want their coaching of others to be effective.

Managers may think they are coaching when they are simply teaching and advising. Or they may use the term “coaching” loosely, such as in describing any interaction with employees.

Coaching skills that are directive include teaching, providing feedback and offering suggestions. Non-directive coaching skills are about asking the right questions and listening. This non-directive approach with coaching is more challenging because it is about helping the individual solve his or her own problem.

Busy managers may find it hard to use non-directive skills as it takes longer and requires more patience. However, effective coaching requires exactly this in order to help employees develop the self-confidence and ability to solve problems on their own.

Another essential element to coaching is adopting a different mindset. Rather than be the natural problem solver that you are to get things done quickly, it’s important to let go of your assumptions, slow down and seek to understand the other’s perspective.

Ask probing questions that encourage your employee to explain the situation, the desired outcome and the potential steps for getting there. Learn to listen really well so you can encourage him or her and ask clarifying questions at the right time. Because when you ask good questions, your employee is empowered to believe he or she has the ability to find the answer. In addition, this employee will be more committed to the solution and more likely to fully implement it.

GROW

The GROW Model can be an effective and simple framework for structuring a coaching conversation. This model was originally developed in the 1980s by business coaches Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and Sir John Whitmore. The GROW acronym stands for:

 

  • Goal – Determine a SMART Goal that your employee is looking to develop. Ask probing questions to help determine if this is in fact the right goal for this person at this time.
  • Current Reality – Ask your employee to describe the situation. Questions can include: What is happening now (who, what, when, how)? What steps have you taken so far?
  • Options (or Obstacles) – Explore what to do next, but let him or her speak before offering your ideas. Ask: What else could you do? What are the pros and cons of that?
  • Will (or Way Forward) – This is about motivation, commitment and accountability. Ask: How will you remain motivated? When can we review your progress?

 

It’s important to follow these in succession in order for the model to be most effective. And remember to maintain this as a conversation so you can continue to build trust and learning is most likely to take place.

Finally, coaching should be done as a normal part of your interactions with direct reports. Look for coaching opportunities when he or she comes to you with an issue or problem to be solved. Instead of helping to solve the problem, help the individual learn to solve it on their own as way towards making progress on something meaningful to them.

Developing the non-directive skills of asking the right questions and listening well, altering your mindset and using the GROW Model will help you build your coaching skills as a manager.

Rethinking the Role of Manager

December 4, 2012

Does your boss often get in the way of helping you be more productive? This is not entirely his or her fault as many organizational structures are based on an outdated incentive mentality that can actually be detrimental in today’s workplace.

The workplace has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Secretaries are scarce, the metallic sound of office machinery is replaced by electronic tones of pagers and cell phones, and—rather than conversing around the water cooler—we are more likely to be texting or using social networks as a way to interact with others.

How we manage other people, however, has remained the same.

The role of manager varies depending on the industry and nature of the work, but when it comes to supervising others, there is very often conflict and disharmony.

In a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “The Value of Bosses” by Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher T. Stanton, supervisors were found to have an enormous impact—good or bad—on productivity.

Among their findings, nearly 75% of all employees say their boss is the worst and most stressful part of their job. And 65% of employees say they would take a new boss over a pay raise.

The same study determined it is not what these bosses do, but what they don’t do that makes them so bad. This includes 1) failing to inspire; 2) accepting mediocrity; 3) lacking clear vision and direction; 4) inability to be collaborate and be a team player; 5) failing to walk the talk.

It turns out that the best bosses are actually teachers, and the report stated that teaching accounts for 67% of a boss’s effect on employees’ productivity.

What if your manager was focused on teaching and encouraging your intrinsic motivation to enable you to be more productive and happier in the process?

Too often motivation throughout many companies is based on the carrot and stick approach. For all but a very few types of manufacturing jobs or those requiring mechanical skills, however, this approach has been scientifically proven not to work. In fact, it can actually be detrimental to productivity.

So why is there so much time and money spent on extrinsic incentives in order to get employees to work harder? Extrinsic incentives include things like a high salary, bonus, stock options, and generous benefits, which are often what attract employees in the first place. However, it is the intrinsic incentives such as interesting work, flexible time on when and where to do the work, ROWE or results only work ethic, 20% time to follow interests, etc. that keep employees motivated and highly productive.

According to author Daniel Pink, intrinsic motivation is absolutely required and his model includes three essential elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives; mastery is the desire to get better and better at something that matters; and purpose is the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.

Workers today face challenges that require right-brained, creative, and/or conceptual thinking. This “outside the box” thinking cannot be incentivized through conventional external means, but instead requires internal motivation.

Intrinsic nature means the job’s core responsibilities and you’re being paid to do something you find satisfying, says Timothy Judge, Mendoza’s Franklin D. Schurz Professor of Management.

After conducting a hundred job-satisfaction studies, Judge says he’s never found one where the intrinsic nature of the work itself wasn’t the most important predictor of overall job satisfaction.

So what if a manager’s role was not to incentivize, scold, or threaten those he or she manages, but instead to teach, inspire, and support the employee’s need for autonomy, mastery and purpose? This new role for manager would look a lot more like a coach, mentor or teacher who is in service of raising the level of productivity of others.

In this way the workplace could be less hostile and more cooperative, less competitive and more collaborative. Managers could contribute to the workplace environment in a way that creates higher employee engagement and greater productivity. And that would be good for any organization.

Motivate Employees through Continual Progress

August 3, 2012

Actively engaged workers dramatically improve productivity and, according to a new book on the subject, the most effective way to engage employees is to help them make steady progress toward their goals.

As I wrote in a previous post, employee engagement should not be merely an HR initiative to use when morale is down. It also should not be a one-off intervention after other extrinsic incentives have been offered up.

Instead, employee engagement should be a strategic approach for driving improvement that is directly linked to achieving corporate goals and organizational change. It should lead to workers who are more emotionally attached, involved and fully committed to their organizations. This can profoundly increase productivity.

In The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, the authors determined that steady, continual progress is far and away the most effective way to motivate employees.

Their research included nearly 12,000 daily reports from 236 knowledge workers from 26 project teams in seven different companies. Each employee was asked to respond every day to the following: Briefly describe one event from today that stands out in your mind.

What the authors found from this was that the best leaders help employees lead satisfying inner work lives, which include consistently positive emotions, strong motivation, and favorable perceptions of the organization, the work and their colleagues.

“Inner work life,” write Amabile and Kramer, “is the confluence of perceptions, emotions, and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workday. Inner work life is about emotions—positive or negative—triggered by any event at work.”

A positive inner work life can be influenced by three elements: progress in meaningful work, catalysts or events that directly help project work, and nourishers or the interpersonal events that uplift people doing the work.

Progress events include:

  • Small wins
  • Breakthroughs
  • Forward movement
  • Goal completion

Catalyst events support the work through:

  • Setting clear goals
  • Allowing autonomy
  • Providing resources
  • Providing sufficient time
  • Helping with work
  • Learning from problems and successes
  • Allowing ideas to flow

Nourishing events support the individual and include:

  • Respect
  • Encouragement
  • Emotional support
  • Affiliation

Turns out how we feel greatly determines how well we perform. And that feeling is most heavily influenced by whether or not we are making progress toward our goals.

On the flipside are events that directly lead to a negative inner work life, which stymies engagement and productivity. Negative events include setbacks in the work, inhibitors or events that directly hinder project work, and toxins or interpersonal events that undermine the people doing the work.

And these negative events can be much more powerful than positive events, all other things being equal. They can also contribute to an increase in actively disengaged workers, who can then undermine everything we are trying to accomplish.

Today’s business environment requires a greater reliance on groups of people working collaboratively to solve increasingly more challenging problems. If the feelings we have can so dramatically impact our motivation to work effectively together and find creative solutions, then heeding this advice to engage employees is paramount to our success.

What about you? Are you actively engaged at work? Is it due to the fact that you are continually making progress as well as finding catalysts and nourishers along the way?

Motivating Employees in the 21st Century

April 5, 2010

Forget all the things you may currently believe about motivating employees. Cash incentives to stimulate productivity may work in the short term, but are ultimately not sustainable. Threats are also short lived because employee resentment brings about ill will and this is counterproductive in the long run.

Such carrot and stick approaches for improving performance simply are no longer effective and it’s time organizations move to a more radical approach.

In Daniel Pink’s insightful book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” he explores the question of what motivates people to do innovative work. Based on more than thirty years of research in behavioral science, he provides compelling evidence showing that monetary rewards can actually hinder creativity.

And as Pink relates in his speech at the TED Conference, when it comes to motivation, there is a huge gap between what science knows and what companies do.

Today, many companies more closely track knowledge workers hours at their desks rather than results produced. And, as I wrote about in a previous post, Results Only Work Environment or ROWE is one way to change this mentality.

Author Pink convincingly argues that once our basic need for financial stability is taken care of, the desire for intrinsic motivation kicks in. Intrinsic motivation is founded upon personal rewards (individual interest or love) rather than extrinsic motivation (money). In fact, many scientific studies have demonstrated that people actually become less motivated when money is tied to doing something we are already drawn to doing. It actually devalues it for us!

Further, Pink suggests it is necessary for both employees and employers to break free of this old “if-then” paradigm and replace it with “now-that” instead. Rather than hold out some reward or punishment in order to accomplish a goal, there should be an opportunity to tap into an employee’s own individual interest in meeting the goal.

“If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation,” said Edward L. Deci, the University of Rochester psychology professor and author of “Intrinsic Motivation.”

The key to tapping into these intrinsic interests, according to Pink, is via autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy is about the urge to direct our lives. It means enabling employees to determine specifically what is entailed (task), when the work is done (time), how it gets done (technique), and with whom it is done (team). Autonomy requires management to step aside and give employees the opportunity to fully apply their creative selves.

Mastery is about the desire to get better at something that matters. It enables each of us to fully engage who we are in what we do. Only in this way are we likely to embrace the work we do as it transcends merely making a living and extends into making a life.

Purpose has to do with the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves. It is the desire to leave the planet better than we found it. Purpose has to do with contributing to the greater good.

Writer and management consulant Peter Drucker stated “. . . once each knowledge worker has defined his or her own task and once the work has been appropriately restructured, each worker should be expected to work out his or her own course and to take responsibility for it.”

Enabling employees to tap into autonomy, mastery and purpose requires management giving up some control over how, when and where people work. It means the boss needs to incentivise people in ways that stimulate their desire to do good work. It means trusting that employees will choose to do the right thing for them as well as the organization.

These motivation techniques may not make sense for every workplace, but at a time of economic recession, global competitive pressures, corporate distrust, and low employee engagement, it makes sense to at least consider them wherever possible.

Mark Craemer  www.craemerconsulting.com