Coaching Skills

Effective coaching is necessary in order to succeed. It can benefit both the leader who is doing the coaching and the employee who is being coached. But there are specific ways to coach in order to create the best possible results.

Coaching skills can be used in many areas of a person’s job. They can help with interpersonal teams, clients, customers, and between managers. Coaching in and of itself is a specific method/technique that can be used to guide an individual to new learnings in a dedicated time frame.

Coaching has specific goals:

• Motivating and inspiring individuals to do more and work harder
• Supporting clients in breaking down large goals into manageable steps
• Holding people accountable to their commitments in order to produce results

The Coaching Process

There is a specific process that a manager should follow in coaching. They should first start with assessing the skills, personality traits, and learning styles of their employees. Then they should define their vision and what the successful outcomes are. They should create an inspiring mission statement that will make an impact with team members. They should also establish annual goals with objectives to meet regularly.

During a coaching session the manager should set the stage and determine why the coaching is necessary, then specifically define the opportunity or issue, then analyze the options and possible outcomes, and finally develop an action plan.

A manager needs to build trust with their employee at the beginning of the coaching process. They should ask open-ended questions to determine the best way to approach the issues and the ways in which the team member should be trained. Different employees may require different approaches. The manager should gather as much knowledge as possible about the situation in order to decide how to proceed.

How to Improve Coaching Skills

Coaching can be made simpler with some additional help. HRDQ is hosting a webinar titled “How to Say It: Coaching Conversations” on Oct. 30. During the webinar attendees will learn a four-step strategy for developing more effective coaching conversations. This strategy works with coaching scenarios like performance improvement, career development, specific skill development and overall team performance.

HRDQ-U and Tayna Longino are hosting a free webinar on October 30th at 2pm ET. Save your seat here! 

We are excited to announce our upcoming webinar!

Event Date: 5/17/2018 (2:00 pm EDT- 3:00 pm EDT)

Coaching team members is one of the most under-valued responsibilities of managers. It’s something they feel they do simply by talking with a team member and asking how he or she is doing in their job and giving appropriate “Atta-boys” or “Atta-girls.” Of course, this is very important and it’s sometimes referred to as “emotional nutrition.” However, it’s not coaching in the sense of skill-building and professional development for the employee.

True coaching is one of the most powerful methods of motivating employees, broadening and improving their skills and increasing their retention. It requires a separate set of skills that positions managers as teachers, advisors, and career counselors.

Participants will learn

• What coaches really do
• How to set good performance standards and goals with employees
• How to communicate more effectively using Personality Styles at Work™
• Directive vs. non-directive coaching- which approach to use and when
• The most important principles of adult learning principles
• Methods of skill-based teaching

Save your seat! 

With a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Safety Engineering and decades of managing people and processes, Geoff Nichols has a wide and deep background to draw from in helping his training and coaching clients. In his approach to management, training and coaching, he emphasizes the need to use situational leadership and the ability to flex to work colleagues’ and team members’ communication needs in order to be more successful in any job.

Business training has been Geoff’s passion for nearly all of his career. After 20 years of executive experience in Human Resources, training and operations management, he founded his own training and consulting business and has conducted over 1,200 public and private workshops. He has trained more than 30,000 people in a wide range of management and leadership topics. And he has written over 600 customized training programs for hundreds of clients- from large and small businesses to federal and state government agencies to healthcare and non-profit organizations.

Geoff has also written a book titled, “Taking the Step Up to Supervision” and numerous articles in national publications on supervision and management. He has trained throughout the U.S. and in Canada, Puerto Rico, the U.K. and Mainland China.