HBR Guide to Coaching Employees (HBR Guide Series)
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About this ebook
Help your employees help themselves.
As a manager in today’s business world, you can’t just tell your direct reports what to do: You need to help them make their own decisions, enable them to solve tough problems, and actively develop their skills on the job.
Whether you have a star on your team who’s eager to advance, an underperformer who’s dragging the group down, or a steady contributor who feels bored and neglected, you need to coach them: Help shape their goals—and support their efforts to achieve them.
In the HBR Guide to Coaching Employees you’ll learn how to:
- Create realistic but inspiring plans for growth
- Ask the right questions to engage your employees in the development process
- Give them room to grapple with problems and discover solutions
- Allow them to make the most of their expertise while compelling them to stretch and grow
- Give them feedback they’ll actually apply
- Balance coaching with the rest of your workload
Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from a source you trust. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review es sin lugar a dudas la referencia más influyente en el sector editorial en temas de gestión y desarrollo de personas y de organizaciones. En sus publicaciones participan investigadores de reconocimiento y prestigio internacional, lo que hace que su catálogo incluya una gran cantidad de obras que se han convertido en best-sellers traducidos a múltiples idiomas.
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Reviews for HBR Guide to Coaching Employees (HBR Guide Series)
7 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great articles on how to effectively use coaching and help employees reach their full potential.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very usefull book ... Yo have it handy on your shelf
Book preview
HBR Guide to Coaching Employees (HBR Guide Series) - Harvard Business Review
HBR Guide to
Coaching Employees
Harvard Business Review Guides
Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.
The titles include:
HBR Guide to Better Business Writing
HBR Guide to Coaching Employees
HBR Guide to Finance Basics for Managers
HBR Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need
HBR Guide to Getting the Right Job
HBR Guide to Getting the Right Work Done
HBR Guide to Giving Effective Feedback
HBR Guide to Leading Teams
HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter
HBR Guide to Managing Stress at Work
HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across
HBR Guide to Negotiating
HBR Guide to Networking
HBR Guide to Office Politics
HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations
HBR Guide to Project Management
HBR Guide to
Coaching Employees
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What You’ll Learn
When you’re swamped with work, it’s hard to make time to coach your employees—and do it well. But if you don’t help them build their skills, they’ll keep coming to you for answers instead of finding their own solutions. That kind of hand-holding kills productivity and creativity, and you can’t sustain it. In the long run, it eats up a lot more time and energy than investing in people’s development.
So you really must coach to be an effective manager. Got a star on your team who’s eager to advance? An under performer who’s dragging the group down? A steady contributor who feels bored and neglected? With all of them, you’ll need to agree on goals for growth, motivate them to achieve those goals, support their efforts, and measure their progress. This guide gives you the tools to do that.
You’ll get better at:
Asking the right questions before you dispense advice
Creating realistic but inspiring plans for growth What You’ll Learn
Providing the support employees need to achieve peak performance
Tapping their learning styles to make greater progress
Giving them feedback they’ll actually apply
Giving them room to grapple with problems and discover solutions
Engaging your employees and fostering independence
Matching people’s skills with your organization’s needs
Customizing your approach
Contents
Introduction: Why Coach?
Coaching is leading.
BY ED BATISTA
Section 1: PREPARING TO COACH YOUR EMPLOYEES
1. Shift Your Thinking to Coach Effectively
You’re learning right along with your employees.
BY CANDICE FRANKOVELGIA
2. Set the Stage to Stimulate Growth
A practical, concrete plan for achieving peak performance.
BY EDWARD M. HALLOWELL, MD
3. Earn Your Employees’ Trust
Build rapport so that they can hear your feedback.
BY JIM DOUGHERTY
Section 2: COACHING YOUR EMPLOYEES
4. Holding a Coaching Session
Ask questions, articulate goals, reframe challenges.
BY AMY JEN SU
5. Following Up After a Coaching Session
Monitor and adjust.
BY PAM KRULITZ AND NINA BOWMAN
6. Giving Feedback That Sticks
Prevent a fight-or-flight response.
BY ED BATISTA
7. Enlist Knowledge Coaches
Tap the deep smarts
of your subject-matter experts.
BY DOROTHY LEONARD AND WALTER SWAP
8. Coaching Effectively in Less Time
Adopt efficient habits and claim found time.
BY DAISY WADEMAN DOWLING
9. Help People Help Themselves
They’ll continue to grow through self-coaching.
BY ED BATISTA
10. Avoid Common Coaching Mistakes
Pitfalls to watch out for—and how to remedy them.
BY MURIEL MAIGNAN WILKINS
Section 3: CUSTOMIZE YOUR COACHING
11. Tailor Your Coaching to People’s Learning Styles
Find approaches to learning that your employees will be motivated to follow.
BY DAVID A. KOLB AND KAY PETERSON
12. Coaching Your Stars, Steadies, and Strugglers
You can’t—and shouldn’t—give them equal time.
BY JIM GRINNELL
13. Coaching Your Rookie Managers
Help them avoid classic beginners’ errors.
BY CAROL A. WALKER
14. Coaching Rising Managers to Emotional Maturity
Don’t promote people before they’re ready.
BY KERRY A. BUNKER, KATHY E. KRAM, AND SHARON TING
15. Coaching Teams
When to intervene—and how.
BY J. RICHARD HACKMAN
Index
Introduction: Why Coach?
by Ed Batista
After graduating from business school, I was hired by a founding board of directors to launch a new organization, the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network. I had shared a leadership position before, but this was my first time as a solo chief executive, and I believed it was my responsibility to come up with the best ideas myself and champion them aggressively.
This approach led to a number of conflicts with my directors. A mentor of mine on the board took me aside and said, We think you’re a talented young guy, but you have some rough edges. We’d like you to invest in yourself and get a coach.
One of my former professors had a coaching practice, and I asked her to take me on as a client. That was one of the best things I’ve ever done.
Although few coaching clients ultimately decide to become coaches, as I did, my positive experience of coaching is typical. The tremendous growth in the field over the past 20 years has been driven by consistent reports from clients who feel more effective and fulfilled as a result of the coaching they’ve received. And it doesn’t help only at the individual level. Although researchers can’t yet precisely measure coaching’s effect on organizational performance, numerous studies (published in the Journal of Management, Consulting Psychology Journal, and other publications) show a positive impact.
Being coached helped me understand that I could make the biggest difference as a leader not by doing more than everyone else but by empowering other people to do more and motivating them to do their best. This meant letting go of certain responsibilities and recognizing the limits of my expertise. I didn’t need to have all the answers; I just needed to ask the right questions. In short, I came to realize that effective leadership looks a lot like coaching.
But what do we mean by coaching in the first place? The simplest definition is asking questions that help people discover the answers that are right for them.
A more specific definition that applies to you as a leader and manager is a style of management primarily characterized by asking employees questions in order to help them fulfill their immediate responsibilities more effectively and advance their development as professionals over time.
The emphasis on asking questions is noteworthy when we consider that conventional leadership roles typically position the leader as the expert, someone who provides answers and whose domain knowledge is one of the foundations of her authority. In contrast, when a leader acts as a coach, she needs to adopt a different mind-set and add value in different ways.
It’s no coincidence that the increased demand for coaching has accompanied the shift from command-and-control hierarchies to flatter, more distributed organizations. In the 1950s, management thinker Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge worker to describe a newly emerging cohort among the white-collar ranks; today most professionals fall into this category. Because they require (and desire) little or no direct supervision and often know more about their tasks than their managers do, knowledge workers usually respond well to coaching. Unlike directive, top-down management, coaching allows them to make the most of their expertise while compelling them to stretch and grow. As their manager, you set overall direction for them—but you let them figure out how best to get there.
Many senior managers and HR executives have come to view coaching as an investment in high potentials or as a perk for stars. Others still see coaching mainly as a corrective measure for underperformers. Daniel Goleman noted in his classic Harvard Business Review (HBR) article "Leadership That Gets Results" (March–April 2000) that despite coaching’s merits, it was used least often among the management styles he studied. Leaders told Goleman that they didn’t have time to coach their employees, and you may feel the same way. But coaching is broadly applicable, and managers at all levels can benefit from working with their direct reports in this way. You may need to encourage those around you to participate—and you may need to be persuaded yourself.
If so, I urge you to give it a try and gauge the return on your investment. Although external coaches like me will always play an important role in supporting leaders and their teams, coaching shouldn’t be our exclusive domain. It’s an essential management tool, and there are circumstances when a coaching manager
can be more useful than a professional coach. I often help clients reflect on difficult experiences in order to make sense of what happened and extract some learning, but these conversations occur days or even weeks after the event. A leader who has coaching skills can help team