How to Coach and Develop Employees

Coaching and developing employees is one of the 31 leadership competencies we focus on in the workplace. Developing your employees can improve engagement, productivity, and employee motivation. Experienced leaders understand how to customize their coaching styles depending on their employees’ needs and learning capacity.This week, I’ve collected recent articles and blog posts to help you learn how to maximize your employees’ efforts with effective coaching and guidance.Developing Employee Skills With Generous Training Incentives. PayScale, Inc: “Fortunately, technology tools make it possible to get the most from employee training and development. From eLearning on demand to instructor-led training held onsite, there are many ways to bring training and education into the workplace. The keys are to understand the purpose of each learning campaign, who will benefit from it, and how to include it as part of a compensation plan. Here are some ways to create an incentive around employee learning programs…. No two learners are the same. Along with having a great deal of responsibility at work, employees have a lot on their plates these days. Make learning feasible with flexible learning models, from online training to classroom learning, that honor all learning styles and time constraints.”Be More Than a Manager: 5 Steps to Coaching Employees. RMagazine: “It’s important that you hold employees accountable for improving their performance. Establish a system for ensuring that employees are progressing toward their goals, and let them know you will be monitoring them and that you expect to see improvements. In addition, you need to set consequences if they fail to make positive changes. That could be not scheduling them on the best nights or even firing them if their performance warrants it. Ensure that they understand the consequences of failing to act. Keep an eye on them.You can’t just hold the coaching session and then wash your hands of the whole situation. Monitor employees daily to gauge their progress.”How To Develop A Coaching Model To Drive Employee Behavior. Millennial CEO: “Accountability should not be associated with reducing the workforce, accountability should be about improving your workforce and yourself in the process. It is important that leaders become more transparent. The team at Buffer.com are doing an amazing job at taking transparency to the next level by actually sharing their formula and all employees salaries. By doing this they were able to attract the right talent to help support their organization mission. One of the best ways to create transparency and make employees feel that they are part of the design is to hold effective team meetings.”The Art Of Coaching Employees. WilmingtonBiz: “As a manager, it’s your job to recognize that each employee has a preferred learning style or a combination of styles. Your coaching efforts can and should include helping your employees recognize and use their preferred learning styles on the job. As their manager, you also may need to adjust your way of communicating with individual employees, or use several methods of communication (staff meetings, web portals, whiteboards)....Communication preferences go hand-in-hand with learning styles. While people are generally aware that they have communication strengths, they may not be aware that these communication styles are well-defined and produce specific and unique patterns.”How to Develop Happy, Fulfilled Employees. The Business Journals: “Being a good leader is all about creating conditions in which your employees can do their best work — and no one does great work with someone else analyzing how every moment of the work day is spent. So, loosen up on the micromanaging and introduce more autonomy into your culture. Strict hours and tight schedule management is very rarely necessary to a business, and usually only serve to make people feel stressed and frustrated. Believe it or not, your employees are adults who are perfectly capable of managing their time and getting their work done. So let them. And watch as productivity rises and your people start smiling a lot more (and chugging coffee a lot less).”Need some help developing your employees? Contact us; we’re happy to assist.Success Labs is a leadership development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.