Are you winning at the game of business?

What’s the difference between managing and coaching teams in business?

In my experience as a business coach I have encountered managers who are transitioning to coaching sales, marketing, call center or accounting people they are responsible for. The companies they work for are making this change because they know that coaching will be more effective in managing those people and will free their time up for other tasks.

Some of these managers came from within the department they are now accountable for and have had management responsibilities added to their current goals. Others were hired from other companies to fill the coaching positions. The problem is that while many of these people know how to manage, coaching takes some additional training and not many have had sufficient coaching training to be effective. Once set up, coaching can take less time but it requires an initial investment of time to get there.

These companies are having higher turnover and unhappy employees. This was not always the norm in the past but internal changes and increases in hiring have thrust managers into the role of coach, something they haven’t been trained for.

It’s like parents who think they know how to coach their kid’s sports team. Just because you know how to play the game, doesn’t mean you can coach others to play well. It’s the same in business. Just because you are a great salesperson, great on the phones or a stellar accountant, doesn’t mean that you will be a great manager/coach.

Just like sports, business is also a game.

There’s several differences between managing and coaching.

Managers deal with:

  • Time pressures
  • Projects
  • Data
  • Problems
  • Information
  • People – usually the mediocre and underachievers

Managers are commissioned to hit some aggressive sales numbers, goals or performance achievements. Coaching is often the last thing that managers want to do because it requires time and getting to know their team members. Often, they also lack the knowledge of how to do it successfully.

One of my coaches, Keith Rosen said, “The premise of coaching is to develop a safe place to co-create new possibilities with people so they can reinvent themselves and who they are at their very core. Coaching provides the opportunity for people to generate solutions and solve problems on their own, WHILE bringing out their very best.”

I have found that successful coaching frees up the manager to do more of what they can do best and to get out of the way to let the player/employee accelerate their growth in the company at their own pace. The good coach will help those that need hands-on help the most but will also teach everyone on their team to be better at the game of work.

Coaching begins with discovering the strengths and weaknesses of each team player. A coach doesn’t push for results but facilitates change that will bring about those results.

For example, in working with one company I learned they had several people that were supposed to be coaching their people but they were really just managing them.

How did I know that? They used such phrases as, “Work harder,” “Get focused,” “Our jobs are on the line,” “Everyone is doing it this way,” “This is how we have always done it,” “Don’t you want to make more money?” and “You did it wrong. What were you thinking?”

Negative comments like this just bring down the team and then performance suffers. Instead of focusing on and tapping into the talents of the people they had working for them they were only looking at numbers. They weren’t inspiring them to achieve more or to build a career with the company.

Over the years I have talked to many business leaders, coaches of professional teams and have built teams of my own within my own companies and with other companies. Here are some things I have found:

  • Trainers teach the fundamentals, rules and how to play the game. Sometimes coaches have to start out as a teacher to help the players learn how to play.
  • Coaches teach how to perfect playing the game.
  • Coaches make champions out of people with potential.
  • Coaches also make team members accountable to ensure they succeed and achieve their high score in every game.
  • Goals should always be set by the player, not the coach or the management. You may have suggestions but if they aren’t the player’s goals, they won’t work as hard at achieving them.

Last year I put together a 20-week program for managers to learn how to be effective coaches of their teams. This works just as well for sales departments, call centers, accounting groups, marketing teams and other groups that can self manage but still need to build their skills at their game.

Each week during the course I work one-on-one with each trainee coach on a 15-minute phone call to help them be accountable to me and to see how they are doing with the assignments they had from the previous week.

Some coaches already know some of the things that I teach but participants develop new skills they didn’t have or are reminded of successful techniques they had forgotten about or hadn’t implemented.

I understand that coaches also have to be managers many times. They just have to know what it takes to be a coach and not just a manager that demands performance.

The question is how are you doing with coaching your team? Are you managing them? Is it taking lots of time? Are you being plagued with high turnover?

In a couple of weeks, I will be teaching a free webinar on coaching winning teams. Would you like to attend? If so, watch for more details in my next email.

 

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