How To Coach Your Team To Success

If you are a leader, and if you truly want to succeed then coaching needs to be an important part of your role. While leading a team requires you to provide clarity and direction for the team, coaching describes the meetings in which more focus is on an individual - showing them how to move their performance to a higher level.

■ Mark Wager is an international leadership expert who regularly runs programmes in Fiji. Mark can be

When you hear ‘coach’ what mind? If you are thinking about a sports coach, providing advice from the touchline willing their team to success then you are with the majority who associate coaching with sport.

Yet, it is becoming more and more prevalent in the business world where leaders are now required not just to lead, but to coach their team to success.

In this week’s article I want to share with you precisely how you can become a coach in the workplace.

What is coaching?

the word comes to

In the first instance, the term ‘coach’ came from Oxford University

in 1830, a whole thirty years before it was used in the sports context.

While at Oxford University, it was used as a slang word for a teacher who had to spend a lot of time with students who were struggling with their lessons.

The teacher was described as having to ‘coach’ the students through the exam, effectively carrying them like the old fashioned coach and horses.

While coaching has evolved over the past two hundred years, it’s still fundamentally the process of taking someone from where they are now to where they want to be.

If you are a leader, and if you truly want to succeed then coaching needs to be an important part of your role. While leading a team requires you to provide clarity and direction for the team, coaching describes the meetings in which more focus is on an individual - showing them how to move their performance to a higher level.

So, when you sit down and chat with a member of your team, there are several stages that you have to go through in order to get the best performance.

Define success

No journey can start clear understanding of journey will take us.

So the first stage of any coaching conversation is to establish what the individual wants to achieve.

It may be a desire for more money, a promotion, or just more satisfaction at work.

We all spend a lot of time at work with people who we generally don’t choose to be with.

They are chosen for us. without a where the

In fact, we often spend more time at work than we do with our friends and family, so with it being such a significant part of our lives, it makes sense to make this time as interesting and as fun as possible.

Establish reality

No journey will be successful unless you know where you currently are.

So, one of the most important roles of a coach conversation is to help establish where the individual currently is, and by this I don’t mean their position, but the level of skills they currently possess, and just how far their skills are away from what is required to achieve their ambitions.

It’s common for people to have a false sense of their ability.

They may overestimate their skills or even fall into the trap of doubting themselves unnecessarily, leading to unnecessarily holding themselves back.

Explore options

There will be many different routes you can take during your journey. You need to decide what is the best route to take.

This leads to the next stage of the coaching conversation.

Once someone has a clear idea of what they need to do in order to improve, they need to discuss how they make those improvements, who is responsible for what and when, including what is the responsibility of the leader.

Perhaps further training or opportunities may be required, and what is the responsibility of that individual.

Remember, coaching is about helping someone on their journey and is never about taking the journey for them.

Take action

Now that the route has been determined, it is time to start the journey and like all journeys, regardless of the length, it all starts with a single step.

In sport, the coach can provide the guidance, but it’s the players who have to win the game, and it’s the same in the business world.

You can open the door, but it’s the responsibility of the individual to decide to walk through.

Some will and some won’t, and all the coach can do is to show the individual the consequences of their actions, and hope they believe in themselves the same way that you believe in them.

Follow-up

Once the conversation is done, doesn’t mean the coaching ends.

Ideally, you want to be meeting with each member of your team on a monthly basis each with an individual plan unique to them, providing a roadmap on how they can achieve success.

Each meeting should take no more than an hour, often much shorter.

But it’s important to remember that just like any journey, it is a series of steps.

Coaching is a series of ongoing conversations, providing support and advice on the way, making sure people don’t go off track and stay focused on achieving their goals.

While leadership is about providing people with hope, coaching is about proving people with a roadmap.

If you are in a leadership role then in order to get the best out of your team, you need to become a coach.

Just like in 1830 at Oxford University - helping people go from where they currently are, to where they want to be. it