The coaching cycle part one

It seems I touched a nerve last week with my blog post “My #1 employee engagement and management tip”.  It was great to have so much positive feedback and so many conversations with people about one-on-one coaching.

The thing I heard most was a request for more information about how we do this here at the Inclusion System and how I would recommend others do it.

I will cover this off in two parts.  Part one (this post) is an overview of the process and part two (next week) will be a detailed description of what goes on at a coaching session.

The basic overview

Each manager meets one-on-one with each of their staff every 6 to 12 weeks.

The coach prepares for the meeting by:

• Reviewing the last few coaching sheets as a reminder of where things are at with the person.

• Preparing strengths focused feedback for the staff person.

• Reviewing the goals that have been set between the staff person and themselves.

I will cover off the details of these steps in next week’s post, along with two examples: one when I did detailed prep and one when I did not.

This can take from five minutes to an hour to prepare.  The nice thing being that if you are too busy for detailed prep on any individual one-on-one you can defer going deep until the next cycle, but you should still have the meeting!  Since the meetings happen so often, it is okay to have a “quickie” every other session, jumping right in with little preparation.

Most of the talking in these sessions is done by the staff person.  I will get into more details next week, but other than the feedback part, most of the agenda is the coach listening to the staff person.  How is it going?  Do you have any concerns or frustrations?  What do you need to do your job better?  How are you progressing with your goals?  Do we need to set any new goals? Listen and make notes, offer up your thoughts and let the person get things off their chest.   Take notes on the agenda sheet and put those in a file.

Issues such as compensation increases, vacation discussions, attendance reviews and the like are best left to the end of the session.

These sessions can start stiff and uncomfortable the first few times, but over time they get very comfortable and open.  The key is the managers doing these sessions with true caring and interest and not just going through the motions.

Next week I will go into detail on the coaching session itself.