Business leaders who incorporate coaching into their leadership strategy often find they foster a more inclusive and more productive working environment. This style of leadership does not focus on weakness. Rather, it aims to encourage and set high standards while offering employees new opportunities within the workplace.
There are several key coaching skills that can be used by leaders in the workplace to get the very best out of their staff. These include mentoring, which you can read more about in the PDF attachment to this post.
Volker Hartzsch has founded several companies and worked as a leadership director, utilising many of the below strategies to empower and motivate employees.
Building Relationships and Rapport
One of the most fundamental skills required for coaching in the workplace is the ability to build relationships and rapport. One of the simplest ways to achieve this is by ‘matching’, where the leader modifies their own behaviour to more closely resemble that of the person they are coaching. This might involve slowing down patterns of speech, matching posture or using more or fewer hand gestures when communicating. The embedded infographic looks at some more top tactics for building rapport.
Focusing on the Positive
Strong and effective leaders are most often those who are able to focus on the positive rather than dwelling on the negative. Instead of criticising employees for poor performance or areas where their skills may be lacking, a good leader will instead look for the strengths of each employee, validate them and help them identify their own unique abilities in the workplace.
Asking Questions
Coaching is not just about coming up with a training strategy and sticking to it. It is an ongoing process that will be influenced by each individual employee. Good leaders will therefore ask effective questions to better understand employee motivation, how their job affects their home life or work-life balance and more. A good question will help make a problem seem more like an opportunity and refocus attention to a more constructive attitude. You can learn more about how to pose a good question in the embedded short video.
Using coaching skills within the workplace can lead to greater insights, encourage creative thinking among employees and result in improved communication and enhanced performance.