Time to find your inner coach
You can’t help but have heard about The Great Resignation which is currently happening in the UK. Fuelled by the pandemic, employees are voluntarily resigning from their jobs because of a deep dissatisfaction with their current employment situation. This may relate to their career, work/life balance, engagement, benefits, long term goals and/or working conditions.
But as a business owner, or team leader, this needn’t worry you if you are prepared to act quickly and positively. To this end, it’s time to ensure you have the skills you need to better understand your employees, including empathy, compassion etc., and can offer flexibility.
This will mean your business is better equipped to adapt to change, ensuring the edge when it comes to empowering and engaging employees to want to stay. Plus, a mindset, or attitudinal shift, will also help you to attract talent more easily.
Develop your coaching skills
No matter what your role, having effective coaching skills can help to support changes to behaviours and/or ways of thinking, whilst also facilitating learning and development. So instead of being a boss all the time, try to be a coach. When you change your attitude and approach to apply a coaching mindset you can listen, understand and then help others to grow and achieve their goals.
What is coaching?
It’s important not to confuse coaching with mentoring, training or counselling. As a coach your role is to help others become responsible for their own growth and development. For this to happen, you need to:
Actively listen to what they are actually telling you, along with what they might not be saying
Ask clarifying questions to explore together what lies at the core of the problem
Not offer advice or give your opinion. Instead, ask questions which will enable them to shift their perspectives, gain new learning and discover different approaches so they can arrive at their own solution.
Allow for silence after having asked a question - this in itself can help people to think and work things out for themselves.
Help them confront underlying emotions, including fear and resistance, as well as other responses that that may hinder or help their development. Gently challenge and push them further, allowing them to gain a deeper self-awareness so they can maximise their personal and professional potential.
People matter
Employees who are trusted, have clear responsibilities, feel included and know they are respected, appreciated and that their voice, opinions and goals matter, will be more motivated, engaged, focused and productive.
Communicate, be transparent, fair and above all support and encourage them when it comes to listening, understanding, learning, development and growth. Look at our Personal Development Template, to help you reflect on and plan you and your team’s development this year.
How I can help
If you’d like help to learn how to harness your inner coach, please get in touch. I can support you through bespoke one-to-one coaching, or manager support to enable you, your team and your business to blossom!