Adopting a Coaching Style of Management
Feedback is an essential component of any team. No matter what level—peer to peer, manager to employee, or business owner to contractor—the ability to both give and receive feedback defines your ability to work effectively as a collective and determines the long-term direction of your team.
Work responsibilities continue to crossover into multiple departments, as projects require knowledge and support across a range of disciplines and experiences. As a consequence, our work environments are becoming more team based and less individualistic.
Adopting a new way of thinking about the feedback process is important. Sports offer useful parallels to management; the one constant of any athletic team is the coach. The coach is on the sidelines, watching all the moving players while staying focused on the bigger picture. As needed, the coach pulls players aside to offer specific feedback that is necessary in the moment, including precise actions or questions to help the player unlock new levels of performance. Sometimes the advice is for the player’s own development; other times it’s for the team’s benefit.
Managing people in a work environment is more complex. Your role isn’t exclusively to oversee your team member’s responsibilities, but to also carry out your own. The manager must achieve specific objectives, maintain his responsibilities, AND coach his team.
But many neglect their supervisory responsibilities, like offering continual feedback, guidance, and assessments, and instead focus solely on their own work. These managers and business owners secretly wish their team and employees would manage themselves. This wouldn’t work for a sports franchise and it doesn’t work for business management either.
No matter what level you’re at within your enterprise, adopting the role of the coach is beneficial as it helps you:
- Build rapport
- Stay results focused
- Maintain a higher level of accountability
- Uncover problems before they reach crisis stage
- Improve productivity and the overall turnaround time of projects
Any good manager coaches his team members and takes great care in doing so. The game of management is a process of continual improvement that requires your dedication, awareness, compassion, and respect—all the qualities of an effective coach.
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