Are you coaching a winning business team? Managing vs Coaching
What’s the difference between a manager and a coach when it comes to business?
Managers have to handle the time pressures and deadlines for the business and make sure everything gets done. This includes both projects that are on the table and coming up. They also have to sort through data and information to determine what is important and what isn’t.
Then there are the problems of attendance, work ethics, laziness, unwillingness to comply with company policies and other behavioral quirks.
There are the people that have problems but yet can be valuable at times. These team members are usually mediocre and underachievers but shine from time to time.
The last hurdle is dealing with “millennials” that are motivated differently than what you are used to. Their work ethic and lax attitude is beyond you.
If you have been to school and received your master’s in business administration, you thought you were ready to handle being the manager and you are. But often you feel like you are a babysitter rather than the leader you want to be.
Maybe you were the best on your team and you were made the manager. But it wasn’t long before you realized that managing takes skills. Then you realized that you were still expected to keep up your old goals and projects in addition to managing the team. You may have become overwhelmed.
Then you heard about coaching and you knew you just didn’t have the time to do that!
In so many cases, that’s the life of a manager.
When we talk about coaching, two types of people come to mind. There’s the sideline person that gets a team ready and moving during a battle we call sports. The second is the business coach that really works one-on-one usually with your managers or team players but maybe hasn’t helped as much as you had hoped they would. Or maybe they have done wonders but you want to be the coach for your people rather than an outsider that really doesn’t get your type of business.
Why aren’t you the coach?
Over the past 20+ years, I have had the opportunity to meet with many coaches, in disciplines ranging from high school and recreation to college and professional sports. In my own businesses I have hired and been mentored by business coaches along the way. They have each taught me things that made me a coach of several teams in my various businesses.
In recently working with a large inbound telecommunications company, I see managers that are trying to be a coach to their agents who are simply lacking the skills to do so. It really does take a special skill set which can be learned but needs to be taught step-by-step to the would-be coaches. Some have learned the skills by trial and error but it has taken them years to learn these techniques. Even they have areas that they could improve if they had the training to be a true coach.
One of my coaches during the time I ran the community newspapers was Keith Rosen. He was very influential in helping me develop the skills to be a coach and to develop our sales team into champions, the graphics team into specialists, and then to teach the managers of the accounting and editorial teams to get them to work better together.
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.”
When coaching is implemented, you’ll find that the people you have will become:
• Better team members
• Stronger employees
• Committed team members
• Satisfied employees
• Trusted team members
• Potentially truly great
• Profitable and less likely to leave the team
In fact, I found that the great sales people became even better (champions) and the good ones became great.
I found that by becoming a coach in my newspaper business, I had more time so I could still do 40 percent of the sales. I managed 12+ people, more than eight managers/coaches and 165 people working for the newspapers. While I was busy with all of this, I also served on several chambers and as a board member of the Utah Press Association.
I could only accomplish this as a coach. There wasn’t enough time in the day to be just the manager of all that I was responsible for. I went from being a manager to coach with the help of some great people who mentored and coached me and our teams.
