The Fenemore Group

Fall 2007

ALIGNING PEOPLE AND PERFORMANCE

You Need A Good Coach To Build A Great Team

By Debbie Depp

There are many ways to align people and performance - from instituting better hiring practices or innovative performance measurement systems, to creating new incentive packages or employee motivational programs. But if your goal is to build a high performance, customer-focused organization, then coaching is absolutely the best return on your investment.

What is Effective Coaching?
Effective Coaching is a disciplined conversation, using concrete performance information that takes place between a leader and an individual or a team that results in continuous performance improvement. Coaching is:

Building people
Helping them set and achieve goals
Creating a climate where they motivate themselves
Challenging them to perform on higher levels
Empowering your employees.

Tips and Techniques

First, you need to establish a coaching relationship. Every growing relationship is based upon trust, value and dialogue. If any of these is missing, the relationship is not sustainable. Relationships must be viewed as assets worthy of investment, rather than merely resources to be used.

As you build coaching relationships, you need to find the balance between controlling behavior (telling what and how) to empowering behavior (questioning and paraphrasing). Otherwise you're controlling behavior instead of coaching behavior.

The sovereign skill of coaching is active listening: You aren't really listening unless you're willing to be changed by what you hear. Active listening is the practice of reflecting confirmation that the speaker is being heard. Combined with good questioning techniques, it indicates that the listener is fully involved in the conversation.

At the end of a coaching session there should be a coaching contract. This is a great tool. Use this to create a closed-loop system for alignment. This is an agreement specifying mutual objectives for the coaching session. The contract defines:

What has to be done
When it has to be done
Who has responsibility
Follow-up action

Results You Can Expect
Coaching makes good financial sense. Happy companies make happy investments. What's good for employee morale is good for shareholder value. Companies can have lots of hardworking, bright people, but they aren't always effective. True leaders make development of human capital a top priority.

Coaches take strong individuals and meld them into great teams. When you align people and performance, you'll build trust and develop the skills necessary to turn ideas into results, enhance leadership, promote accountability, and strengthen interpersonal relationships to create a more productive work environment. You'll be able to improve your organization's overall communication and decision-making process. This leads to reduced stress levels and increased cooperation among employees. Teamwork increases individual productivity and company profitability.

Remember...customers must have a consistent experience with your company and the performance of your people will define that experience. The goal of every company is to create business value through people. Through coaching you can unlock the potential of your employees for continuous performance improvement. You truly can get extraordinary results from ordinary people. Try it and see for yourself.

Productivity Pointers

To create a 'Coaching 'Culture there needs to be a top-down commitment. Here are 5 Super Techniques to get you started:

1. Reinforce positive behaviors...Ongoing feedback is much more effective than annual feedback. Catch employees in the act of performing positively and immediately reinforce them. Acknowledgment, recognition, and a simple pat on the back are powerful reinforcements. Using them appropriately will lead to sure-fire results.

2. Uncouple employee development and compensation discussions...
Unfortunately, the performance review and the salary review have become one and the same in many organizations. There is nothing worse for employee morale than to have to tell an employee that their performance is great but that there is no or very little money available for raises. The goal should be to help employees develop and grow. Salary reviews should occur separately on an annual basis.

3. Make certain that the performance standards are clear and achievable...Use quantitative rather than qualitative measures whenever possible. Employees should also participate in formulating their own performance objectives, so they feel they're controlling their destiny and take ownership. Research has shown that these objectives work best when they are clear, tangible, specific and when appropriate, time-bound.

4. Make sure the performance measures are relevant...One size does not fit all. For example, the quantitative measure of 'billable hours' may be relevant for project workers within a professional service firm, but not for those whose sole responsibility is quality control.

5. Provide team and customer feedback...
Performance feedback from team members and customers is often much more useful than supervisory feedback. Conducted properly, 360-degree performance management systems that include these measures can be very useful to employees.