Are you coaching, advising or coaching your employees? Awards for new managers who need to know

In all my years of training managers on how to coach their staff, common misconceptions always crop up regarding what we really mean by coaching in a business environment.

If you plan to improve your coaching skills with your employees to help them fulfill their potential, here’s what you need to know first.

Mentoring is not Coaching although there are many similarities.

Like Coaching, Mentoring can be formal or informal. Like Coaching, it is a positive relationship, often between a person with more experience and a person with less experience. Like Coaching, Mentoring is also done with respect and wisdom and is valued by the other person.

Unlike Coaching, however, Mentors provide advice and solutions and say what they think the other person should do. The keywords are: “provide advice and solutions”. If you find yourself giving advice to your employees, you are not coaching.

Advice in companies is not Coaching.

Counseling is where:

a) A staff member is given disciplinary action and counseled about their behavior and that terminology is used a lot in the military and police forces or

b) Your staff have serious personal problems and need to speak with a qualified counselor who specializes in that area. Unlike Coaching, Counseling focuses on past issues and ends in the present. The keywords are “disciplinary action, personal problems and from the past to the present”.

So if you have in-depth conversations with staff about personal issues and try to provide guidance, you’re likely not coaching, but counseling them.

Training is different again.

A trainer tells and demonstrates. It is often a one-to-many scenario and the trainer is licensed to be quite prescriptive in their language and directive in their actions. The keywords are “tell and show.”

Now this is where students often say, “Hey, wait a minute, Juliette. What about a sports coach? His job is to count and demonstrate techniques.” Well, that’s true. This is how Sports Coaching usually works. The Coach counts, plans the play, demonstrates the techniques and gets the team to act accordingly. That sports training.

But that is not what employee coaching is all about and if you visit any executive, business or life coaching school or register with the International Coach Federation, which is the leading body for professional coaching worldwide, you will soon see that professional business coaching requires a different approach than your usual sports coach. Please read this very carefully because this is the simplest but often the most contentious concept for managers to grasp, but it goes to the heart of who you will or will not become as a coach to your people. Workplace coaching does not provide advice. He doesn’t spend much time looking at the past. It is not based on a one-way flow of telling and instructing.

Life, business and executive coaching all:

a) Start in the present (not in the past)

b) Use powerful listening and questioning techniques to understand where your employee is now and where they want to go to determine how they will get there.

c) They are based on the philosophy that their staff already know the answers to most of their challenges, but lack the confidence or insight to back up their own judgment and act.

d) Focus on unlocking the inner wisdom of employees so that they can solve their own problems with confidence.

Business, executive and life coaches know that in most circumstances their coachee (staff member) has experienced a similar issue before or knows someone else who has or has the ability to find a variety of options and chose a solution. with a little help. The coach’s job is not to give the solution or give advice (as a Mentor would) but to question the person to help them find sixteen opportunities for themselves to develop their own ability to find their own solutions.

It’s amazing how a few quick guiding questions can help others on the road see the opportunities around them and give them the confidence and insight to explore them.