5 Coaching Tips For Leaders on Your Team

Here's How to Start Coaching Your Team

Leaders who know how to coach are much stronger at engaging employees and achieving higher performance. Coaching helps help leaders gain an in-depth understanding of the coaching process, develop crucial coaching skills and competencies, and practice using those skills with real work situations. One of our favorite leadership books, Great Leadership Creates Great Workplaces, offers the following: “If you want to be great at anything, whether it’s playing bridge, playing the piano, playing sports, or being a leader, sustained effort, deliberate practice, and good coaching are required.”

At a leadership event we held recently, The Leadership Challenge^® co-author Jim Kouzes gave us some valuable coaching and practice tips that HR professionals and managers (or manager-coaches!) can use to help develop the leadership capabilities on their teams:

Be a Coach by Using these coaching tips with each leader on your team:

Coaching Tip #1. Encourage leaders to start their day with this mantra: “Today I will make a positive difference in the lives of the people I lead.”

Coaching Tip #2. Ask leaders: “What’s the next step you can take as a leader that will stretch you?”

Coaching Tip #3. Connect leaders with someone who is an expert and can provide an example of leading effectively and show them by example how to lead.

Coaching Tip #4. Identify a mentor or trusted advisor as a “stable relationship” throughout the development of the leader.

Coaching Tip #5. At the end of each day suggest that a leader ask and record “what did I do today to improve so I am a better leader than yesterday?”

Leadership development continues to lead the list in workplace trends. Millennials, in particular, want and seek out coaching as a valuable professional support. If you want to learn a more specific step-by-step process, we recommend the Coaching Clinic's 5 step coaching conversation process. To maximize leadership potential on your team, learn more about our coaching options.