The Best Bosses Don’t Manage. They Coach.

Tue, 01/02/2024

Sydney Grace Bannister

Coaching, rather than simply managing, your employees can have huge positive outcomes. This approach can improve your team’s performance, enhance their job satisfaction and confidence, and help them achieve their goals. Coaching also builds trust and increases employee retention rates.

What’s the difference between managing and coaching?

Coaching takes place when a more experienced person (usually a manager) helps an employee learn new skills, improve their performance, and advance their career. Managing typically focuses on getting things done: reaching milestones, meeting deadlines, and keeping projects on track. By contrast, coaching is about developing talent: shaping an employee’s behavior, teaching them problem-solving skills, and helping them feel more invested in and engaged by their work.

In short, the difference between managing and coaching is the difference between monitoring employees and developing them. Coaching creates a partnership between the manager and the employee as they collaborate on what needs to be achieved and the best way to achieve it. During a coaching session, an employee takes responsibility for their professional development as the coach guides, supports, and empowers them to solve problems and make progress toward goals — while providing access to whatever tools and resources they need.

Coaching doesn’t focus on checking, supervising, or controlling employees’ work but on cultivating better, more motivated workers.

When is coaching helpful?

Coaching can be used to accomplish a range of things, from making progress on a special project to helping an employee address a challenging behavior. Here are some examples of things you might focus on during coaching sessions, as outlined by Marquette University:

Behavior modification: If an employee is regularly late in completing tasks or struggling with a heavy workload, a coach can help them find time management strategies that work for them.
Skill development: Coaching can help someone strengthen areas where they’re weak, such as communication skills or technical abilities.
Job performance: If an employee needs help reaching a certain deadline or quota, coaching can provide them with the tools, knowledge, or skills they need to perform their job more efficiently and effectively.
Problem-solving techniques: Coaches can teach employees brainstorming, mind mapping, storyboarding, and other techniques to improve their problem-solving abilities. Afterward, employees will be able use these methods to work through issues on their own.
Attitude improvement: Coaching can be used to teach employees how to set goals, reduce the fear of change, or adjust to a period of transition, such as after a reorg or when a colleague retires.

Coaching sessions should occur regularly, as opposed to just once a year during the annual review cycle. The content of a coaching session should also be highly personalized to an individual employee, depending on if they need education, encouragement, or improvement.

How does coaching benefit employees?

A manager who coaches their employees has the power to improve those employees’ experience of work. According to Marquette University, coaching has been shown to:

Improve employee performance.
Enhance job satisfaction.
Help employees achieve personal goals.
Promote collaboration and teamwork.
Encourage open communication and build working relationships.
Teach workers problem-solving skills.
Increase employee retention rates.

Within a coaching framework, mistakes are viewed as lessons that educate employees rather than failures that require punishment. Employees are encouraged to experiment, take risks, and use creativity to solve problems, while the coach provides guidance or advice. Through this process, employees gain confidence as they acquire new skills and figure out ways to overcome workplace obstacles. They also feel empowered by being included in the decision-making process, which increases their comfort with leadership and builds trust in the organization.

When you engage your employees through coaching, they get direction, purpose, and goals to work toward. And as you help them reach their goals, they feel more capable, accomplished, and satisfied.

How does coaching benefit the organization?

It’s good for employees when they feel happy, invested, and productive, of course — and it’s also great for the organization. First, the gratification employees receive through coaching ensures that you’ll be able to retain key members of your team for longer. Naturally, when an employee receives more face time with their manager and their manager shows interest in their employee’s professional development, that person will interpret these basic tenets of coaching as signs that they are valued by the organization. And employees who feel valued by their organization want to stay there longer. (In fact, according to the LinkedIn Learning 2019 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of workers said they would stay with an organization longer if it invested in their career development.)

Second, coaching to improve performance, rather than to manage tasks, creates employees who are more dedicated to their work and to organizational goals. As they’re allowed opportunities to contribute directly to the overall mission, they feel more connected and loyal to the organization. As a result, the business and the employee can mutually thrive.