As a manager, the measure of how effective you are is shown within the ways you coach your team to encourage them to perform to their best abilities and remain engaged and motivated. A motivated team will always provide greater ROI for your company, so coaching skills are central to achieving this.
What do employees want?
Employees are looking for a manager who is strong at giving constructive feedback, interested in their personal development and able to provide opportunities within the company, as well as genuinely caring about each individual. With these things in mind, here are 8 coaching tips to help you to be a better manager.
#1 – Don’t answer every question
It can be tempting to answer every question employees ask, or demonstrate your own skills by taking care of different tasks, however a good manager will sometimes hold back knowledge and skills to allow employees to think and develop these skills too. Self-discovery is an important skill for your employees to learn, and if you can ask them questions back, or provide feedback to help them on their learning journey, this is often the best way to coach them in their role.
#2 – Be aware of how you introduce ideas
It’s also important to consider how you introduce ideas or encourage employees to look at different routes or options. Asking them further questions, or providing a different perspective can be really helpful, if delivered in a considered way. Avoid being harsh or critical where employees are putting in effort but may just be unaware of something. This is true for both personal behaviour and work skills.
#3 – Learn to be flexible to benefit your team
Flexibility is a great skill for any manager, as it requires learning to take into consideration the needs of your employees. This might mean prioritising based on helping them with different tasks, or putting your opinion aside to make suggestions, so that employees learn to form opinions and know that they count, rather than just knowing they’ll be overruled.
#4 – Help employees to support their ideas
Part of building trust within your team is not just encouraging ideas and perspectives, but also getting employees to learn to justify their ideas through supporting arguments. They should know why they are offering input on an idea, and as a manager, you can help them to develop skills to answer questions and create solutions in a confident but also strategic way. Asking them “why?” is the key to this.
#5 – Take pauses
As a manager, especially with new employees, it’s essential to take pauses at different points during discussion. This is something that can help to ensure that they are taking in everything that they’re learning, and can highlight any areas that are not clear. This can help you in your role too, as it can show you any areas that need going over again, and what each individual’s strengths and weaknesses are.
#6 – Use brief stories
Sometimes analogies or stories can be useful to help employees to understand situations or concepts, so if you can use this to your advantage, this is a great skill to have as a manager. It’s important to keep these as brief and clear as possible, so as not to add to any confusion.
#7 – Think about why you are sharing things
>When you’re sharing personal experiences or stories, it’s important to ensure that you’re telling them for the sake of your employees, and not for your own sake. There is a balance needed between personal life and business, and sharing can be useful for training or even building personal relationships with your team, but knowing when to share is essential.
>These tips should help you to become a better manager, and with lots of things, these behaviours are often learned over time. Building respect and trust is key to this, so if you can listen to your team too, this will help you to develop your own skills.
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become a better manager.