You set up weekly touchpoints with your team. You book Monday huddles. You collaborate and provide feedback. Yet you’re still not seeing the performance and results momentum you were expecting. That’s because there are two grave errors you’re making. One: while these habits are important, they don’t amount to coaching, and coaching is more powerful. Two: coaching isn’t used to tackle performance issues. But I’ll let you know exactly what it’s used for and how to use it to get the most from yourself and your people. You’re only a short read away from finding the answer to, “What is workplace coaching?” and having a leg up on everyone else because you’ll actually know how to do it the right way.
Are You an Audio Learner?
Learn how to coach in the workplace that actually gets results while engaging your team by tuning into episode 202 of the Your Brilliant Difference Podcast.
Key Terms to Know to Enhance Your Reading
- Edge Moves: incremental and cumulative behaviors that facilitate change towards a desired outcome so you can unlock your potential, lead confidently, and make a transformational impact.
- Edge Moves coaching: creating an environment where individuals can identify and take incremental courage steps beyond their comfort zones, unlocking their potential through empowering conversations. It helps them navigate neurological resistance to change and fosters transformational impact through progressive, cumulative growth.
What is Workplace Coaching?
Coaching is a term loosely used to describe various forms of management and people development.
Traditionally, the purpose of workplace coaching is to enhance employee performance. Unfortunately, this looks like telling people what to do and directing them on how to do it. And if it isn’t done right? Managers readily step in to do it for them.
This kind of coaching doesn’t work, nor does it achieve its original goal of improving employee performance.
Instead, get the most results from helping people cultivate the courage to change their current behaviours, enabling them to achieve desired outcomes. Help them go beyond their comfort zones with Edge Moves. That’s why I call it Edge Moves coaching or being an Edge Mover’s coach.
Take a look at this comparison chart to get the full picture:
See the difference?
When done right, with an Edge Moves approach, not only does your employee experience a transformation, but you do as well. And it has a deeper, longer-lasting impact than traditional coaching that focuses on honing skills. With Edge Moves coaching, you empower your people to take action and drive results.
Workplace Coaching Examples
I’m not boasting about this workplace coaching approach off the top of my head. I learned it the hard way in my own career, and I’ll give you some insight into my coaching successes and failures.
Coaching Done Wrong
Let’s get the lesson learned out of the way so you can learn from my mistakes.
Honestly, this was a point in my career when I thought I knew what coaching was (in the traditional sense), but jeez was I wrong.
I had been a manager for six years at a bank. My team was getting results, they were engaged, and everyone seemed to be getting along. It wasn’t until I took a coaching certification program outside of my company that I learned that what I called coaching was anything but.
At that time, the company I was working for instituted an ABC coaching model. It stood for: antecedent, behaviour, consequences. There is a trigger—the antecedent—to initiate a specific desired behaviour, and because of that behaviour, there is a consequence.
In addition, the company was attempting to establish a fervent sales performance culture, so they set up daily huddles for management to report their results and share their action plans with the leadership team on how they were going to achieve their sales results for that day. It was an opportunity for each manager to share their antecedents, behaviours, and consequences.
For example, the daily huddle for management was an antecedent that supported each manager in preparing an action plan for their day (the behaviour), which would, in turn, drive a consequence of positive sales results by the end of the day.
All this made sense, until it went horribly wrong. Backwards.
Leadership began using the consequence element of the model as a motivation tool.
That meant if your team was behind on their sales quota, senior leadership would have you attend additional calls throughout your day. Every time a sales team didn’t hit their daily sales goal, the following day the manager would need to attend the usual morning huddle, plus a mid-day check-in, as well as an end-of-day wrap-up.
The idea was that these calls would be so painful (managers would need to report the number of meetings, proactive calls, and sales closed) that it would be just the right kind of motivation a manager would need to get their sales.
This method was demotivating, ineffective, and made people feel more like widgets in a factory than people helping their clients achieve their financial goals. It was disheartening to look around and observe that it didn’t matter what Brilliant Difference each leader brought to the table. It wasn’t about them or their Brilliant Differences… It was only about the outcomes and results they delivered.
Coaching Done Right
As part of the coaching certification program I was enrolled in, I needed to get practice hours in to obtain my designation, so I had asked my assistant manager if she’d be game in doing some of these coaching sessions with me.
I was able to practice my new skills to earn the certificate. Now, even she was used to the ABC coaching model, so she wasn’t all that enthusiastic to add more coaching sessions to her daily routine.
I let her know this was different than what we were doing at the bank.
When it was time for our first coaching session, she was caught up with a client, running behind. It seemed as though she wasn’t too eager to end her conversation.
When she finally arrived, I began asking her how she was doing and what she wanted coaching on. She was taken aback because, normally, the manager drove the coaching agenda in our company, not the coachee.
Over the next thirty minutes, I listened to her express her career aspirations and desire to make a difference in her work. She wanted to get more exposure to operational elements of running a branch as well as the skills to inspire and motivate her team. This coaching session felt different for me too. Instead of driving the bus it was as if I was a passenger in her car, asking her where she wanted to go, why she wanted to go there, and what she hoped she’d get out of it.
As a coach, I wasn’t driving the car. I wasn’t the GPS telling the driver where to go. I got to sit and enjoy the ride. When you show up as an Edge Mover’s coach, you let go of the wheel and eject yourself out of the driver’s seat with compassionate curiosity, going along for the ride with your coachee.
It wasn’t till my second coaching session with her that I realized the transformation she was already experiencing. It was a few minutes before we were scheduled to meet, and I mentioned we had a coaching session coming up. At first, she seemed despondent.
Then I said, “We’re not doing ABC coaching. We’re doing the new coaching we did the last time.”
Her face lit up like a Christmas tree, and she ran to get a pen and notepad, scurrying into my office five minutes early.
It was the first time anyone had brought a pen and paper to take notes (without prompting) to a coaching session. I knew I was on to something, that this kind of coaching was different.
Dreadful Burnout or Eager Growth? The Choice is Yours
When coaching is done wrong or not at all, it can actually make your team run away from their role and responsibilities, disengaging or unplugging completely. That’s lost progress, results, and in the end, potentially talent and profit. That’s costly.
But as an Edge Mover’s coach, when you use the method, you too can make your employees eager for meetings, logging on or entering the boardroom early, with a notebook and pen in hand.
If there’s anything you take away from my story to help you achieve the latter, download and save the comparison chart. Keep it with you during your workday and start seeing transformations within yourself, team, and results.
You got this, one Edge Mover’s coaching conversation at a time.
