This is a guest blog by Sean Conrad

What is coaching and why is it so important? Oh, and just to clarify, I’m not talking about sports team coaches. I’m referring to coaching in the workplace—the ability for a manager to bring out the best in his or her employee for the good of the individual and the organisation.

What we do know about coaching is that it isn’t about managers providing direction, instructions and comments on behaviour to employees (that’s feedback). Coaching is a unique one-on-one relationship in which a manager helps an employee explore—through meetings, discovery and ongoing dialogue—the obstacles that hinder performance and how to deal with them. The coaching process can reveal a wealth of information that can be used to drive positive change for the individual and the organisation as a whole.

Coaching can be a powerful approach for helping employees who are suffering from “I can’t get there from here” syndrome. These individuals might request coaching for any number of reasons, including a need to:

1. Clarify goals and objectives, and put action plans into place to achieve them
2. Resolve complicated issues related to colleagues, relationships and trust
3. Develop the skills that can help them become a stronger leader, better manager or more skilled professional

When done right, coaching is a great tool for increasing employee engagement and productivity, driving up overall organisational performance. Naturally, this begs the question, “How do you do it right?” Here are a few tips to help you along.

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but it’s an important point—everyone is different. There isn’t anyone in this world that thinks or acts in exactly the same way. Equally important to remember is that the perspectives, motivations and responses of others aren’t any better or worse than ours, they’re just different.

We need to value our different ways of thinking, perceiving, solving and acting. Often we can achieve the best results when we consider all perspectives, and adopt a combination of approaches to any situation.

This means that when we coach our employees or give them feedback, we need to first consider our differences and the value of our differences, so we avoid making judgments based on these.

Do a little discovery. Ask your employee questions about the work situation or challenge to reveal his or her way of thinking, assumptions, preferences, and bias. Here are some questions you might try asking:

1. Why did they choose their particular course of action?
2. What do they think and feel about their performance in the situation at question?
3. What do they think and feel about the results?
4. What other tactics or behaviours could they have adopted?

Once you’ve helped your employee explore their thinking and feeling about the situation and their perception of its impact, you can share your own observations, including what you saw and what you think you saw and remember.

A word of advice here, be careful not to jump to conclusions and remember that your perceptions might not be 100 percent right all the time—yes, really.

Now that you’ve done some preliminary discovery work with your employee, it’s time to share your perspective. Tell them about personal career examples of how you’ve handled situations that are similar in nature. The objective here is to explore other approaches and to highlight their respective strengths and weaknesses as this is how we broaden our perspective.

You want to help your employee see how a different approach can lead to more effective results, and find new ways that work for them.

Consider offering your employee some closer coaching as they work to change their behaviours and practices. For instance, they might want to check in with you to review an alternate approach before they actually put it into practice.

Regardless of approach, techniques or individual differences, a good manager will work with employees to listen, question and “coach” them to a deeper self-awareness and growth. The outcome of this approach? Greater engagement, higher performance and the ability to adapt more easily to organisational change.

A senior product analyst and Certified Human Capital Strategist at Halogen Software, Sean Conrad regularly writes about talent management trends and issues in industry publication and the Exploring Talent Management Blog.