From the course: Coaching Employees through Difficult Situations

What is coaching?

- Coaching is not cheerleading it's leadership. And it's not about standing on the sidelines and barking orders. It's about teaching skills and improving mindset to make meaningful improvements in performance. It's easy to walk around putting out fires and directing behavior, but coaching has a bigger, long term payoff. Coaching will give you a much more resilient and confident team, and a team that can function even when you're not there to call the shots. A lot of business coaches like to use sports analogies, and I rarely do that because business is different than sports. In sports there's a clear distinction between the players and the coaches and that's not always the case at work. In sports there's a winner and a loser and the game has a set time period, and organizations don't work that way. In the Harvard Business Review article "Why sports are a terrible metaphor for business", the writer points out in football there's one Super Bowl winner and 31 NFL teams with crushed dreams and dispirited fans. Most of the time coaching in the workplace is nuanced. It's about having coaching conversations on a daily basis. Like the time someone on your team messed up an order, or got a tough customer, or had to pick up the slack for somebody else. Don't think coaching has to be a big formal process. That's too daunting and you'll never get around to it. You'll get more benefit when you address situations in the moment. These live-time situations. What's happening right now are your best opportunities for coaching. In this course we'll use the boss to employee coaching relationship for our role plays, but you can use the same techniques in peer-to-peer coaching, and even when you're managing up. So two key principles. Business coaching is not sports coaching. They're very different. And your best coaching opportunities are live-time. What's happening today. Coaching isn't a ra-ra moment. It's day in, day out leadership that results in incremental improvements in attitude, belief, and skill. Of course, every coach is going to face some tough situations. In this course, we'll show you how to handle 'em.

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