The number one skill leaders should possess is the ability to converse and thoughtfully react to situations. We call this Coaching Situationally.

A manager/leader is faced with so many day-to-day challenges that affect people in the workplace. A manager/leader is typically encountering conflict, employees who lack motivation, employees who are exceeding expectations, employees who are exceeding expectations where there may be no visible career path, etc. All of these prompt the manager/leader to have the ability to converse and navigate conversations thoughtfully and professionally. Not always easy to do!

Let's take two examples that recently happened at one of our client sites. First, the manager had an employee who is constantly late coming to work. The employee was the nephew of the CEO. You can imagine the manager was hesitant to handle the situation and due to a lack of conversing on this issue, other employees lost respect for this manager over time. A second example was a supervisor going up to her manager and asking the manager if he had a second (I always struggle with that request because we know it's going to be much longer than one second) and the manager abruptly responded, "I'm in the middle of something very important" and he turned away. The funny thing is the manager is a great guy and a very thoughtful person. The supervisor immediately interpreted the manager's reaction that she was not important. This clearly demonstrates where a lack of conversation can cause discord unintentionally. The supervisor immediately began griping about the situation to other supervisors. Think about both the scenarios and the domino effects due to the lack of conversation or the ability to react in the situation thoughtfully and professionally.

If you're interested in learning about how to become a coach who situationally handles various challenges, one who can converse and adapt on-the-fly thoughtfully and professionally using applicable strategies and techniques that drive performance and engagement check out our situational coach program: click here

Note: We have completed a Coaching assessment that measures a leaders' ability and agility to coach. Fill out the above form and we would be happy to send you an assessment and provide you an aggregate score specific to your coaching ability and agility at no cost!

Note: NOTE: 2^nd –  To hear more from Tim Hagen on topics related to becoming a better coach, register for CUNA Coaching Conversations eSchool: Part 2, Fridays, October 4 to November 1.