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Prioritizing your coaching effort
Most managers would agree that they do not do as much coaching as they would like to do, and the
reason they give for this is lack of time. It is undoubtedly true that most of you will not have the
time to do as much coaching as you would like to nor as much as is required. But it is worth reflecting
on how well you use the time you do make available for coaching and whether you are investing that
precious resource wisely, i.e. getting a good payback for your effort.
There are generally three mistakes that are made:
- Managers try to coach too many people at once, spreading themselves too thinly and so not spending enough quality time with anybody to achieve the desired results.
- Managers focus their effort on their poorest performers even when there is little realistic chance that these people will improve significantly.
- Usually as a result of (2), managers will neglect those people who can improve significantly with relatively little coaching input.
EXERCISE 6.2
| Spend a few minutes now reflecting on whether you make any of the three mistakes just described in the coaching that you do. |
The planning process you are about to embark on will help you to avoid these mistakes. If you are avoiding them already, it will give you a structure which may help you to recognize how you have
avoided them and to keep on avoiding them in the future.
The first step of the planning process is to see yourself as a scarce resource that has to be deployed carefully and strategically if it is to be used well. This may mean the following:
- Focusing your coaching on one or two people at a time.
- Having a rationale for whom you coach when.
- Prioritizing key performance areas for development.
- Identifying clear targets within which to limit your contribution.
We will work through each of these in turn. When we have finished, you will have drawn up the first stage of your coaching plan.
Who should you be coaching?
If you do not have a lot of time and you are managing a group of several people, you need to decide where best to focus your coaching effort if you are to coach proactively. To make this decision you need to assess your people against four factors. You will have used three of them when identifying your overall objectives earlier in Part 2. They are:
- Competence: Their ability to do their job to the standard that you require.
- Potential: Their potential to improve their performance and to develop their careers within the organization.
- Motivation: Their desire to improve and their readiness to learn and develop.
- Pay-off: The benefit to be gained if they do improve their performance.
Often managers respond only to the competence issue: if someone is not doing their job well enough, they will try and help them to do it better. But if the person does not have the potential to improve, or is not motivated to do so, you have to decide whether the effort that will be required to coach that person is justified by the pay-off that you are likely to achieve. If the answer is that it does not, coaching will not be the appropriate solution. Case study 6.1 offers two examples from a clinic that I once ran for a group of sales managers.
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