Great managers understand the importance of fostering open and honest relationships with their employees. This helps to motivate and engage them, leading to a productive team of engaged individuals. Every person has different motivations, preferences and personalities, so it is important to ask questions that help you understand where their “why” comes from and what their preferred way of being is. This will allow you to adapt your coaching conversations to match the way they work best with the improvements that both of you seek.
Constant training is essential for onboarding and retaining employees, improving performance, developing skills and transferring knowledge. During meetings and individual sessions with employees, ask how you can improve your coaching role to help them achieve the performance and behavioral goals that you have set together. It is also important that they have deep enough knowledge of what should be done to be able to teach and train others on the task. When you train employees to improve performance and engagement, approaching things from their perspective, rather than your own, will greatly help you to see the changes and results you want. If your coaching conversations focus entirely on what isn't working and what the employee needs to do to change, that's not motivating, but rather demoralizing. Guiding, open-ended questions lead to more detailed and thoughtful answers, leading to more productive coaching conversations.
Leaders who train employees instead of giving them orders can create a much more talented and agile workforce, leading to a healthy and growing business. Developing your management repertoire through the 10 effective training strategies described below will help you better support your employees and become a more effective manager for your team members.
10 Effective Training Strategies
- Encourage Transparency: Encouraging transparency can help establish trust between managers and employees.
- Have an Open-Door Policy: Make sure that you are clear, friendly and non-judgmental at every training meeting.
- Show You Care: Make an effort to show your employees that you care about them, that you consider them valuable members of the team and that you have a strong interest in them and in their success.
- Focus on Results: Coaching conversations are meant to bring about change and results, so be sure to clearly define and describe what needs to happen next.
- Use a Coaching Leadership Style: The leadership style of coaching is proving to be much more effective with today's employees than the more authoritarian styles with which many business leaders operate.
- Reinforce Learning: Training others is an effective method for reinforcing and transferring learning.
- Be Open-Minded: Leaders should be open-minded when it comes to new ideas or approaches.
- Be Flexible: Leaders should be flexible when it comes to adapting their approach based on feedback from their team.
- Be Supportive: Leaders should be supportive of their team members by providing guidance, feedback and resources.
- Be Patient: They haven't mastered the work yet, so there's still a lot of “eye-opening” training going on.
It also means showing them that you care about them as individuals by taking an interest in their success. Additionally, it is important to focus on results by setting clear goals for improvement and providing guidance on how those goals can be achieved. Finally, it is important to use a coaching leadership style that encourages transparency, open-mindedness, flexibility, supportiveness, and patience. By following these 12 rules for mastering employee coaching, managers can create an environment where employees feel comfortable expressing themselves openly while also helping them reach their goals. This will lead to improved performance, increased engagement, better retention rates, and ultimately a healthier business.
