Strong work relationships have a foundation of trust

When it comes to the manager/ employee relationship, mangers at high-performing companies align three factors: 1) The individual’s interests 2) The individual’s skills 3) The organization’s needs Development Zone: The intersection of interests and the organization’s needs provides managers with guidance for the individual’s future development plans. Realignment Zone: Where employee skills and the organization needs overlap, managers have an opportunity to redesign job accountabilities or develop opportunities for the individual to coach others. This helps to build engagement by focusing on what energizes the employee the most. Reassignment Zone: Managers should proceed with caution when an employee has both skills and interest, yet there isn’t an organization need. This is an area where team members may gravitate, artificially creating opportunities to invest their time to the detriment of other higher priorities. Core Coaching Zone: This is the intersection of skill, interest, and the organization’s needs. The ability to target and grow this ‘sweet spot’ is a superpower. It’s also the focus of their regular, ongoing coaching conversations that align the people on their team and enables them to make course corrections when necessary. Getting to this point requires a trusting relationship between the manager and the individual they’re coaching. A manager with no formal training as a coach, but who has established trust, will get much farther in helping others develop than a manager with lots of formal training but low trust. Employee in the driver’s seat It’s important to note that coaching is not something managers do to their employees. Rather, it’s a collaborative process that requires employees to be active participants. They should want to be coached because they are the ones at the center of their own career. To prepare for coaching conversations, employees need to think about what they like to do, what else they may want to do, what makes them feel competent and confident in their work, and under what circumstances they have fallen short of achieving a goal. They need to think about short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals—plus whatever else they want their manager to know. By putting all this on the table, employees can express who they are and what they want out of their job. For managers, the number one task during conversations with employees is to listen. Really listen. And listen intensely. Maybe the manager asks a few drill-down questions, but the idea is to listen more and talk less in order to get the full measure of the individual. Alignment between interests, skills, and organizational needs becomes easier the more managers know.

Stephan Hagelauer is vice president of consulting for Energage, a Philadelphia-based research and consulting firm that surveyed more than 2.5 million employees at more than 6,000 organizations in 2017. Energage is The Denver Post’s research partner for Top Workplaces.