Being a people manager is hard! Your team has a lot of responsibility and when you manage people, there are different opportunities, successes and challenges each day. You need to provide your team members with support, guidance, mentoring and coaching.
And, this is the time of year when performance reviews are coming up. While it is important to strategically set goals for 2025, and to reward, recognize and celebrate the successes of 2024, this is also the time to put on your coaching hat.
Your team needs you.
- A rock star needs more challenges
- A high potential employee isn’t finding the success that you both feel is possible, and needs help developing a better habit or two
- An employee that is struggling and needs guidance
- An employee that isn’t a good fit for their current role and needs some advice and feedback that could help them find a position or company that is better for them - yes, sometimes it is the role of a manager to coach someone out of an organization
Thus, I wanted the focus of this blog to be about coaching.
What is coaching?
I view coaching as being a sounding board, and in posing questions that will help your team members explore and develop in a way that they own and value.
Coaching is different from mentoring or providing guidance.
Mentoring is often about sharing your experiences - this is why people often want to be mentored by someone that is a role model. The mentors that I have had in my life have been people that I wanted to emulate, and allowed me to see them in action so that I could learn how they approached different situations, and handled different challenges.
Providing guidance, or feedback, is helping an employee successfully complete their tasks. This includes explaining how to do something, providing constructive feedback when expectations are not met, and giving positive feedback to reinforce good behavior. Guidance is critical - and should be direct and respectful, but that is a topic for another blog.
Coaching at its heart
The core of coaching is engaging your team members so that they can develop their skills. This involves asking questions and supporting your team members and helping them find the answers. This involves being truly curious. Here are a few coaching questions to consider:
- What are your career goals?
- Where do you want to be in five years, and how can I help you get there?
- What are the skill gaps that you need to fill?
- What are barriers to filling those gaps?
- How can I support you?
- What types of experiences would you like to get in the next year?
Listen carefully to the answers, and see what themes can be incorporated into your employee plans for 2025.
Be sure to circle back to these themes and ask more questions throughout the year to help keep them on track. During the year, be aware of situations that come up where your team member might have missed an opportunity. This is another great time for coaching questions like the following:
- Why do you think the situation turned out the way it did?
- What might you have done differently to avoid the situation?
- What would you do differently next time?
Showing care and curiosity are two of the best things you can do as a manager.
It will help you engage your employees, support your team, deliver better results, and help your organization succeed through thoughtful staff development.
Got questions?
Please let me know if you have other coaching questions that we can add to our manager resource book. If you would like to chat more about how to support your managers, please send me an email at Amy@AmyCellTalent.com and we can set up a time to chat.
