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Eight Tips for Coaching Employees

Effective coaching helps employees grow and improve, builds employee commitment to the goals of the organization, helps you keep star employees, and it helps you create a service experience of superior value. Ineffective coaching de-motivates employees and puts the organization at serious risk for both customer and employee defection. Customer loyalty is at risk because without critical performance feedback, employees are not fully positioned to deliver the level of service customers expect and deserve. Employees are at risk for leaving your department or company for the same reason: in order to excel and experience job autonomy, employees need critical performance feedback.

Here are eight foundational strategies you absolutely must employ when coaching employees in order to be effective. If you’re not doing these things, you’re not really coaching. If you hired me to help improve the overall effectiveness of your coaching process, these eight foundational strategies would be our starting point and we’d stay on these eight strategies until ALL coaches mastered them. I urge you to work on the strategies, fully implementing each one so effectively that the people you coach would give you a rating of a ‘10’ on each point.

1. Establish clear performance expectations. As a “coach” it is your job to make sure that the people reporting to you have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. Never assume your employees know what you expect. Describe in great detail the performance you need and expect from the employee, and check for understanding.

2. Make each coaching session a dialogue, not a monologue – It’s important to get the employee’s feedback and input throughout the coaching session. Take the time to ensure the employee clearly understands what you’ve said, and to gain commitment for performance improvement. If you do all of the talking, real performance change is not likely to result. Not only that, the employee will be less engaged and may experience more anxiety if she is not a part of the coaching session.

3. Ensure consistency among teams. The format, frequency and evaluation criteria of coaching sessions must be consistent in order to be fair to your employees. The manner in which the interactions are handled must also be consistent. Ensure all coaches are coaching using the exact same model and the best way to do this is to train them on the same model and to calibrate* at least monthly.

*If more than one person will be coaching employees, it is extremely important for the team of coaches to calibrate. To calibrate is to standardize the evaluation of employees and their performance. You calibrate to ensure each employee is evaluated on the same things in the exact same way. For a step-by-step formula for holding calibration sessions, join one of our Coach the Coach Webinar sessions.

4. Coach regularly. The most common interval for coaching is monthly but weekly or quarterly coaching can also be very effective. Your employees need to know when to expect coaching and the sessions should not be sporadic.

4. Provide tangible evidence of reviewed performance - This is particularly important when constructive feedback is given. Employees may dispute the feedback or simply be in denial. If you have tapes of recorded calls or detailed documentation of mystery shoppers, you will be better able to assure your employee that the review is valid.

6. Don’t shy away from constructive feedback. It is critically important to address and correct unacceptable performance or behavior immediately. We owe it to our employees to give them every opportunity to do their best. Sometimes this means giving them constructive feedback.

7. Gain commitment for performance improvement.  Ask questions to ensure that your employee understands the expectations as you do and that they are truly committed to carrying them out. Get the employee to give you a verbal commitment that they not only understand the expectations, but will also work toward improving in the specified areas.

8. Praise improvement and continue to coach when expectations are not met. When employees make improvements, be sure to let them know you’ve noticed. When they miss the mark, it’s important to let them know and to offer suggestions on how they can improve. Hold employees accountable for improvement.

A well-designed and well-implemented coaching program will help you develop employee potential and improve your company’s overall service experience. Take the time to benchmark your current coaching process against the strategies presented here and make improvements where needed. If you’re not currently coaching consistently and effectively, develop a process now.

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