“While top performing athletes strive for their coaches attention, poor to average employees strive for their bosses to leave them alone”
-Nathan Jamail, Keynote Speaker, Bestselling Author
How do you know we are managing our people and not coaching our people? It’s simple- look at who you spend most of your time with and look at when you spend time with them.
In my book I write, “Corporate America is corrupt, not because of money but because so often we ask leaders to coach their employees yet we never teach our leaders how to truly coach”.
Coach’s in sports spend their time with those athletes that deserve their attention, the starters and the first string, and they spend extra time with the super stars. Because of this, every athlete is striving for their attention because they view the coach’s attention as a reward for being the best.
In business, leaders spend most of their time with those that need the attention- the struggling or bad employees- therefore if the manager is spending time with an employee it is looked at as a failure on the part of the employee. This means the message this behavior sends is “be so good your boss leaves you alone”.
In order to take our employees or sales teams to the next level, we as leaders have to start coaching versus managing. We have to focus on making our players better vs just more experienced. We must use our engagement as a reward, not a consequence. This is an easy concept to understand, but it is a difficult discipline to put into practice.
How to do it:
In order to gain the appropriate buy in and understanding, there are a few steps to follow.
- First share your intention of your involvement. This is very important so the employees don’t fear your involvement or think they are doing something wrong.
- Start working with your top reps to prepare for upcoming meetings. Find out what meetings they have in the coming days and help them prepare by identifying their goals and activities.
- Be sure to scrimmage the meeting with them so they are practiced and not doing it for the first time at their meeting.
- Make sure to do this right; we can’t just show up, we have to have an impact, ensuring our involvement is helping our employees prepare and succeed.
This does not mean ignore the weak or the new:
This means learning to prioritize your schedule. New employees, similar to new athletes, deserve the coach’s attention to help them get up to speed and learn the skills and knowledge of the business. So they do get a high level of priority, second only to the top performers.
As for the employees that are struggling, it becomes more about helping them to move up or out of the position they are currently in. Coaches must help employees learn if they are willing and capable to improve. There are no bad employees, but there are bad fits. As coaches it is our job to help our employees find success, and sometimes that means making difficult decisions on helping them to find a better position that they can be successful in.
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Final Thoughts:
There is a quote that says, “I hire good people and let them do their job”. This might be ‘cool’, but I don’t think it is very helpful to those we hire. Coaches hire good people and make them better. The reason most leaders don’t coach their employees is because they can’t (won’t) make the time. Usually they feel they are too busy working on urgent tasks and urgent problems. I challenge any leader that leads a team- if they prioritize coaching their people to be better no matter how good they already are, they would have a lot less urgent problems.
As for me; I want to work for a person who is committed to making me better, pushing me to go beyond my current success so I can be the best me possible. Not everyone feels this way, but those employees we want and need to be the best, do.
