Coaching your employees can be a very worthwhile venture.  As company owners, managers and supervisors, we are often looking for ways to increase revenue and manage costs.  Sometimes we overlook our greatest assets- our employees.  In order to build loyalty and morale, employees must feel they are a valuable and important member of the organization in which they work.   When employees and supervisors communicate well  and work together towards the common goals of their organization, productivity and morale will improve and employees will be happier. Keeping long term, loyal employees is far more cost-effective than recruiting and retraining new employees who have replaced burnt out, unmotivated, unproductive employees.  Well coached employees are creative forces who can be counted on to provide solutions their supervisors may not have considered.  As an employer, you may want to consider training supervisors to coach their employees.

Supervisors can become good employee coaches by learning and engaging in the following:

1. Learn your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. This helps the coaching relationship create positive results.

2. Identify barriers to success.  These barriers can be limitations such as a lack of resources or education, information, training, a positive attitude or more.

3. Determine what motivates your employees. There are many types of motivators and different things work for different people. Once understood, motivators become powerful tools for helping employees remain enthusiastic about learning and coping with chage. One of the the most important and overlooked motivator is good communication between the supervisor and employee.  Employees appreciate knowing what is going on in their organization and having an open door policy with their supervisors.

4.  Communicate your organization’s strategic direction and the company’s goals.  Helping employees to understand the “bigger picture” is very beneficial to the coaching process.

5.  Learn when it is appropriate to intervene with an employee when an error could create substantially negative consequences to the employee or the company as a whole. The supervisor must learn when to avoid a pattern of rescuing or jumping in too early which can undermine the employee but also when to step in.

Successful employee coaching helps employees understand goals and expectatons to that they may act instead of waiting for instruction.  Because coached employees don’t have every solution dictated to them from above, they tend to take greater ownership of their work and demonstrate greater responsibility than employees who are not coached.

Coached employees are also better prepared to maximize their potential. With that, everyone wins.

This blog article was written  from excerpts of an article written by Daniel Feerst, LiCSW,-CP   www.workexcel.net

If you would like more information about how we coach managers and supervisors, please contact us at audreyr@fee-eap.com