By Kamilah Lewis, Marketing Coordinator
Coaching is an important skill for managers who want to develop their teams and performance. Effective coaching means guiding team members to identify their strengths and weaknesses, providing support, and helping them set goals and develop plans to achieve those goals. Organizations are starting to recognize the benefits of coaching, and thus, more and more require managers to have effective coaching skills.
How effective are manager coaches compared to external, certified coaches? The short answer is that both are vital to developing a strong workplace culture, but in different ways.
Managers have the most direct contact with their team members and are responsible for providing feedback and mentoring to their team members. Coaching skills for managers involve creating a safe and supportive environment, listening actively, and facilitating employee development. Manager coaches need the flexibility to take a traditional feedback-based approach where it is needed. However, the more they can employ a coaching approach, guiding the employee to their own solutions through conscious questioning, the more long-term benefits the organization will experience at every level.
Advantages of Manager-Coaching:
- Direct Contact: Since managers work with their team members on a day-to-day basis, they have more context about their team members’ strengths, weaknesses, and goals, and can approach conversations with clearer context and an established rapport
- Company knowledge: Managers have a better understanding of their company’s goals and priorities, which helps them better develop their team members’ skills while also ensuring it’s aligned with the company’s overall strategy.
- Availability: Managers typically have a regular cadence of 1:1 update meetings where they can readily provide coaching to their team members and can provide it as coachable moments on the job as well. External coaches can bring a fresh perspective and years of dedicated coaching experience to an organization. As opposed to managers, coaches work with individuals typically for an hour every two weeks to develop and achieve their professional goals. They are more focused on the professional goals and needs of the individual rather than the company.
Advantages of External Coaching
- Objectivity: External coaches can be more objective because they do not have an agenda for the organization or its employees. This allows them to more effectively help employees identify blind spots or areas for improvement.
- Confidentiality: External coaches are bound by strict confidentiality terms, which means employees can be more open and honest in their discussions. This can lead to more effective coaching sessions and better outcomes.
- Expert: Certified coaches specialize in coaching and go through rigorous training and professional standards through the International Coaching Federation. They are experts in areas such as leadership development, communication, or conflict resolution. They bring a wealth of experience and confidence to coaching conversations, fast-tracking the progress of employees reaching their goals.
Challenges of Manager-Coaching
- Bias: Managers can have personal biases towards their team members, which can affect their coaching. An established relationship may get in the way of a productive conversation
- Limited Perspective: Managers can have limited perspectives within the organization’s culture and may not be able to see situations as an objective third party.
- Busy: Managers have many responsibilities and may not have enough time to dedicate to coaching their employees. Therefore, their feedback and opinions may be rushed, or coaching can be deprioritized.
Challenges of External Coaching
- Lack of technical knowledge: External coaches may not have a deep understanding of the company’s culture, or of a coachee’s technical area. As a result, coaches must focus on adaptability to meet each coachee and clarify understanding in terms of company culture and key stakeholders. .
- Cost: A smaller organization or an organization new to coaching may not be willing to make the investment in external coaching.
- Limited availability: External coaches have many clients, and typically see clients during set appointments, rather than informal conversations in the workplace, meaning they are limited to the information that coachees share with them. Some programs will offer triangulation meetings with the employee’s manager, the coach, and the coachee to tie it back to another perspective.
Companies can benefit from both manager and external coaching, but it’s important to recognize the different benefits both can offer. Managers focus on coaching their team members in a way that supports their development and drives results. External coaches are more likely to provide impartial confidential coaching services to help professionals achieve their goals, increasing long-term development as well as employee retention.
If your organization could benefit from a coaching approach to leadership, PowerUp has recently launched a training program to develop these skills for managers. To learn more, click here, or book a call with us.