Expand coaching beyond execs, boost productivity
When famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden was asked why the team won 10 national championships while he was coach, he listed five simple concepts: “we won because I was above average in: analyzing players, getting them to fill roles as part of a team, paying attention to fundamentals and details, and working well with others, both those under my supervision and those whose supervision I was under. Additionally, I enjoyed very hard work.”
Wooden’s comment about analyzing players caught my eye because it reflects the findings of a recent study from consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which found that productivity can rise significantly when frontline managers coach direct reports instead of simply giving orders.
The idea of using a coach to improve business results has been around for years, but until recently it’s been reserved almost exclusively for the executive suite. The McKinsey study and others suggest that expanding the reach of coaching to frontline managers may help address the all-too-common scenario of having a very busy manager face a line of people outside the door who are waiting for direction or a problem solved.
I thought again of Wooden and one of his favorite mottos: “others have brains too."
Teaching managers to coach
Cindy Domanowski, founder of Percio Strategies, Inc. and former vice president of sales with ADP, is an expert in coaching and consulting with B2B sales organizations. She says if done correctly teaching mid-level managers to coach direct reports can increase productivity significantly in a very short period of time.
“I’ve seen managers use coaching skills to halve the amount of time it takes for a new sales associate hit their quota,” she said. “And managers who are good coaches will not allow employee performance to flat line, which benefits an organization’s ability to grow overall.”
In Domanowski’s work with sales managers at payroll processor ADP, the goal was to use coaching methods that would help reduce ramp up time of new sales associates and increase retention of talent. As is the case with many companies, most of the organization’s sales managers had been promoted from within based on a solid track record of performance. Because of their success, their comfort zone tended towards “telling” or “showing” direct reports how to make sales.
When the managers were taught to coach, they understood the value of asking questions when assessing an associates skills or performance. Questions such as
what worked?; what didn’t go so well?; anything else? and what will you do the next time? helped the direct reports take on more responsibility and develop their own conclusions about improvement.
To have these effective “coaching conversations” with direct reports the managers had to learn how to slow down, take the time to create an environment that was free from distractions and actively listen.
“It’s very common to hear ‘sounds good but I don’t have the time,’” Domanowski said. “But I say if managers trained in coaching dedicate just two hours a week to actively listening and asking questions - in just four to six weeks they would see enough improvement to want to spend more time doing this."
Google's answer to the war on talent
Google learned the hard way about the importance of coaching in the workplace. In prior years, the company which is comprised of many very smart engineers, tended to overlook the value that the non-engineering employees brought to the company and this impacted the organization’s ability to retain talent. In 2009, the company initiated a program called Project Oxygen that was tasked with finding ways to create better bosses. According to Google’s director of people analytics and compensation Prasad Setty, the project got its name because "good managers are the lifeblood of Google, helping it grow and innovate."
The project began with extensive research of Google’s own data-- looking at performance reviews, the frequency that managers met with direct reports, feedback surveys and extensive observations about management.
As part of the findings, Google discovered that the quality of the manager had the single greatest impact on employees’ performance and how employees felt about the company. According to Google’s vice president for people operations, Laszlo Bock, what employees valued the most was not the technical expertise of the manager, but rather a boss who made time for one-on-on meetings, who helped employees with problems by asking questions not dictating answers and who took an interest in employee’s lives and careers.
Google has created a list of rules called “How to Engineer Better Managers.” The number one rule is to be a good coach. According to Google, this requires providing specific, constructive feedback that balances the negative and positive. It also means taking the time to have one-on-one meetings with direct reports and presenting solutions to problems that are tailored to an employee’s strengths.
Getting started
Domanowski said companies can take a number of approaches to training mid-level managers. Some organizations train someone in their HR department to facilitate a coaching program. Others hire a consultant to train managers in coaching. Regardless of the approach, look at both the experience of the consultant as well as their relevant certifications and credentials to ensure that their knowledge and expertise fit your company’s needs.
