The Effective Manager, 2nd Edition

10Ask for More—Coaching

The third critical behavior for effective managers is always raising the bar and asking for higher levels of performance. The Manager Tools Coaching Model allows you to help each of your directs grow their skills without you spending more than 5–10 minutes a week on their improvement efforts.

Most managers with some experience have been put in at least one situation where they knew they needed to help someone grow. One of their colleagues, or someone from human resources (HR) said, “You really need to coach him.” But nobody knew how. Or it involved weeks and weeks of planning a 6‐month improvement plan, with daily and weekly tasks. And they slunk away from the drawing board, without the time or the knowledge to get a plan in place and see it through.

Coaching is the least often used tool among the Manager Tools Trinity. There are some good reasons for this. One on Ones (O3s) are the most powerful, and once managers start O3s, they never want to let them go. Feedback happens next, but it's hard for many of us, and so we stumble. Many of us are afraid of introducing conflict, and fear increased turnover (even though of course the opposite is the case). And if we can't get through feedback, it's unlikely we're going to embrace the coaching. Feedback takes seconds, but coaching takes months—it seems much harder.

And before we go any further, here's an important caveat here about vocabulary: coaching, to different parts of the professional world, has two ...