The manager as coach

The manager as coach
With the appropriate skills, it is possible for any person
to coach another. However we must also recognize that, as
managers we have a host of other responsibilities to attend
to and that some of these might make it difficult to coach
as often or as effectively as we might like. Some
organizations solve this problem by appointing people to a
specific coaching role. However, in many workplaces this is
simply not feasible and it is much more effective to ensure
that managers and team leaders are equipped with good
coaching skills.

The trick is for us to understand some of the tensions
created by acting as coach and manager to the same group of
people. Let's look at some specific issues:

"I also have a range of other tasks to attend to"

In our role as a manager we have many demands on our time.
We probably have to allocate and distribute the team's
work, monitor budgets, keep records and attend to quality
control and so on. For most of us it is impossible to do
everything so we prioritize; trying to attend to the most
important jobs first. Unfortunately this can lead to
short-termism and constant fire fighting and mean that
coaching and training take a back seat. We tell ourselves
that coaching and training are important and that we'll do
some when we've got all these other things done. But
tomorrow never comes and our in-trays get filled with more
urgent or important stuff and the coaching gets left for
another day and so it goes on. The great irony is that this
vicious circle can really only ever be broken by investing
time in training and coaching the team, so that
increasingly they are able to take on more tasks and free
us to do more coaching and thus create a virtuous circle
instead.

"I might sometimes have to discipline the same people"

This is undoubtedly true and does need to be considered in
establishing an effective coaching relationship. As a coach
we are primarily concerned with helping others to learn and
so we need the people we coach to feel completely
comfortable in talking through work related issues with us.
A good coaching relationship is founded on trust. We must
trust in our team members to work towards their potential
and they must trust that we, as their coaches, will keep
confidential anything said during a coaching session.

What we need to do is explain to people that as mangers we
wear 'different hats' and that when we are coaching we are
doing so with the utmost sincerity and that our concern is
to work together to identify improvements in performance.
Other management processes such as appraisal reviews or
disciplinary matters should be handled separately from any
coaching sessions so as not to confuse the roles.
Coaching works best against a background of high trust and,
as this may take time to build, we may have to wait
patiently for the coaching sessions to develop to a point
where people feel really comfortable in talking about
things they'd like to develop. Happily, coaching is a
really effective way of generating trust quickly as people
will soon see that the good coach genuinely wants to help
them reach their potential.

"I might not be able to give them what they want"

Some managers worry that their staff might 'hijack'
coaching sessions and use them as an excuse to ask for all
sorts of expensive or irrelevant training courses or funded
education programmes. These same managers fear that by
turning such requests down they are seen as being insincere
and not really taking their coaching role seriously.

Once again, trust is important here and so is clearly
defining the purpose of coaching at the outset. We need to
make sure that our team members realize that coaching is
about helping them to move forward and exploring ways of
achieving this but that coaching does not take place in a
vacuum. In other words whilst, as a coach, we will wish to
support a person's development, quite obviously we will
need to balance this against a range of other factors such
as other team member's needs, budgets, timescales and so
on. We might not be able to grant every request that
emerges from a coaching session but this is no reason not
to coach in the first place.

"There might be more pressing issues"

In terms of the structure of a coaching session, the most
effective coaching happens when the individual sets the
agenda as this is in keeping with the notion that coaching
should raise awareness and generate responsibility.

However, many mangers are at a loss to know what to do if
their own view of what the current performance issues
differ from those of the team members. Again we must
acknowledge that whilst this is a possibility, it is not a
reason to avoid coaching. We must accept that we cannot
hide behind coaching in the hope that we might avoid having
to confront a difficult performance issue. If there is a
need to 'tell it like it is' or to give someone some
pointed feedback then that is what we must do. Furthermore
we should do so openly and honestly and not pretend that
what we are doing is delivering a coaching session for the
other person's benefit.

It is important that we understand these factors as we
consider the role of the manager as coach. None of the
problems mentioned are insurmountable and provided we are
aware of them, none present any real barrier to effective
coaching.

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years'
experience. He works with a host of clients in North East
England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and
Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their
true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides
a simple yet elegant key to this lock. For a bumper load of
coaching tips and tricks - including FREE resources - visit
http://www.mattsomers.com