The Progress Coaching Blog

Supplements are so prevalent here in the United States that they have their own storefronts, loyal fan-bases, and are even touted across cable networks due to their popularity. Scientific evidence shows that some of these are beneficial to our overall health, but on one condition- they are most effective in conjunction with overall healthy behavior like diet and exercise. You can't take a magic diet supplement, for example, and expect to lose weight, all while pounding cheeseburgers and beer (wouldn't that be AWESOME?). So, in order to get the most out of your supplements, you need to support it with a healthy lifestyle.

Coaching is the new leadership. The days of leaders commanding and demanding people with little to input are way behind us. People crave strong leaders, but they also want an opportunity and a platform to share their ideas and insights.

When you think about conflict, or confronting someone, does it make you nervous? Doesn't it make a lot of people nervous? I want to share a notion with you that conflict, in certain moments, can be unbelievably healthy. Let me give you a couple of examples.

One of the toughest things that we go through is our ability to recruit employees. The toughest thing we need to consider is that the world is shrinking and it is very easy for candidates to find out what our organizations are like as well as specific managers and their leadership styles. A brief example might be a candidate going to work for a company and not knowing much about the company. What will the candidate do knowing he or she may have multiple offers from different companies? They may go to LinkedIn and see if they know anybody at the company. This is where a manager's personal leadership brand becomes evident or least it’s perception. A candidate might call someone at the company to find out what that boss is like. On one hand what if the boss has a reputation of not being very engaged and occasionally flies off the handle yelling in staff meetings? On the other hand what if the manager is engaged and has developed a relationship of being positive in a great developer of talent?

The most fundamental mistakes managers make when they're coaching is that they coach to the situation and not to the issue(s). Let me give you a brief example. Let's say you walk by and you hear three people at the water cooler gossiping and talking negatively about other people. You hear them demonstrating very mean spirited comments. They are really being poor teammates and employees. Often, we might address those situations feeling like we've corrected them when in fact we have not even started to coach to the real issues which might be poor attitude or a lack of teamwork or not upholding corporate values and principles. We tend to have managers thinking about coaching as an apparatus to fix things or to adjust people.

What's been a pleasant surprise in the last two years is that the coaching industry and the coaching movement has gone from this concept of, "It would be nice to coach if we had time," to organizations stating, "We must coach our employees." This has been, needless to say, refreshing.

This still begs the question- how do we motivate our managers to coach?

This article is not about how to coach, but how to continue to push our managers up that hill, since time is not an ally when so many managers today wear so many hats.

One of the questions I receive frequently from managers is about getting their managers or executive team to coach them. They often fear retribution if they bring it up- as if they are crossing a line. When we provide our program to organizations, everybody says you should start with the executive team, which I agree with, but often it gets pushed down to management levels below the executive team. Executives are incredibly busy today, but so are managers below this level!

When you hear the words engagement and coaching used together, you generally think about your employees. Are they engaged enough in their work and with each other? What can I do as a coach to improve their engagement? However, one of the most important questions generally goes unasked. Am I fully engaged in my coaching and with my employees? As a coach, it is important that you are 100% engaged.

Bad attitudes are a choice. However, they are a choice made by one person, that can affect an entire company. As a coach, you should always be coaching to positive attitudes, regardless if bad attitudes are present in your employees or not. Coaching employees to have positive attitudes can help prevent bad attitudes in the future. 

The purpose of coaching is progress. We coach to help employees progress toward their goals and eventually achieve them. Coaching is the means to a successful end. Progress can be seen in many aspects of an employee and their work. Motivation, attitude, engagement, effort, relationships, etc. all show how an employee is progressing, and each of those aspects is developed by coaching. Progress develops from good coaching techniques. Here are 7 coaching techniques to help increase progress.

The phrase "Communication is key" can be applied to almost any situation. Communication is how tasks get done efficiently and correctly. Giving feedback is one of the most important types of communication, without feedback, people wouldn't know if what they are doing is correct or if they could improve. As a coach, giving your employees feedback is one of the most important things you can do to improve performance, teamwork, and attitude.