High-Performance Coaching for Managers

A Step-by-Step Approach to Increase Employees' Performance and Productivity

William J. Rothwell, Behnam Bakhshandeh

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000594782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Coaching is a necessary skill for managers. It is important as a fundamental part of an organization's talent efforts—including talent acquisition, development and retention strategies. For a coaching program to succeed in an organization, it should be recognized as a useful approach throughout the organization and become part of the fabric of the corporate culture. Performance Coaching for Managers provides an important tool for organizations to use to train their managers on coaching.

This book differs significantly from other books in the coaching market. Many books on coaching cast coaches as facilitators who question their clients (the coachees), helping them to articulate their own problems, formulate their own solutions, develop their own action plans to solve problems, and measure the success of efforts to implement those plans. That is called a nondirective approach.

But this book adopts a directive approach by casting the coach as a manager who diagnoses the problems with worker job performance and offers specific advice on how to solve those problems. While there is nothing wrong with a nondirective approach, it does not always work well in job performance reviews in which the manager must inform the worker about gaps between what is needed (the desired) and what is performed (the actual). The significant difference between what is currently available in the market and what is offered in this book is the authors' collective experience of over 70 combined years of hands-on research and delivery experiences in the Human Resources Development field.

According to the Harvard Business Review (2015), workers generally expect their immediate supervisors to give them honest feedback on how well they do their jobs—and specific advice on what to do if they are not performing in alignment with organizational expectations. When workers do not receive advice—but instead are questioned about their own views—they regard their managers as either incompetent or disingenuous.

Effective managers should be able to offer direction to their employees. After all, managers are responsible for ensuring that their organizational units deliver the results needed by the organization. If they fail to do that, the organization does not achieve its strategic goals. This book gives managers direction in how to offer directive coaching to their workers.

I BUILDING RELATIONSHIP AND RECOGNIZING THE SITUATION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003155928-5

Establishing rapport and building relationships with employees is one of the most important elements of management, which helps understand “what is happening” with them, their productivity, and their overall performance. Throughout this phase, we are trying to educate and increase the knowledge and understanding of high-performance coaches and managers-as-coaches about:

• Chapter 4—Step 1: How to Establish Relatedness and Building Rapport?
  How can the consultant/manager establish rapport and a contractual relationship with a coaching client?
• Chapter 5—Step 2: What Is the Issue at Hand?
  What is the present situation that requires coaching? What is happening? Describe it in detail.
• Chapter 6—Step 3: What Should Be Happening?
  Describing the desired target, results, and outcome.

Chapter 4 Step 1: How to Establish Relatedness and Building Rapport?

Behnam Bakhshandeh

DOI: 10.4324/9781003155928-6

Most people care about their relationships with family, work colleagues, customers or clients, and friends. People who care about the quality of their relationships know those qualities do not happen without work—and continuing cultivation. Quality relationships are created and developed over time. Relationships grow when people display interest, create open communication channels, and establish strong rapport based on mutual respect and understanding. That is true with home and work relationships.

In today’s organizational cultures, in some shapes and forms, management is losing the ability to establish a good, authentic rapport with their workforce. Contrary to some corporations trying to establish a more meaningful work environment and create deeper connections with their employees, some are trying to diminish emotional connections from the work environment. Because of that, many workplaces became automated (Gilmore 2019)—or even toxic. We are not saying this because we are against automation and high productivity due to mechanical and technological advancement, but it is because of the disappearing deep connection and strong rapport between organizational leaders and the workers.

This book and its chapters are based on the relationships between managers-as-coaches and their subordinates and what it takes to create high-performance workers through high-performance coaching relationships. Throughout this chapter, we educate managers-as-coaches about what rapport is and how they can practice using it with their subordinates and coachees to start high-performance coaching on a strong foundation.

This chapter looks at what rapport is, how to establish rapport, and how to form a contractual relationship with subordinates or coaching clients. In this chapter, readers will grow familiar with the general concept of rapport. Chapter 4 covers these topics:

• What is rapport and the importance of it?
• What are relatedness, empathy, and compassion?
• Rapport and basic psychological needs
• Rapport and synchrony
• Fundamental states of being and competencies for establishing relatedness and rapport
• Role of organization values and culture on rapport
• Key factors to remember from this chapter
• Some discussion questions to support manager-as-coach development

Some Definitions and Descriptions

These terms will be used in this chapter:

Rapport

Briefly stated, rapport means to have a positive connection with others. Here are some carefully chosen definitions of rapport:

• “The relation characterized by harmony, conformity, accord, or affinity” (Merriam-Webster 2021).
• “Rapport is a positive connection with another person, one that involves caring and understanding” (Angelo 2012, 11).
• “I like to define rapport as a deep emotional connection and understanding between two people” (Gilmore 2019, 2).
• “Colloquially, rapport is the emotional experience of high-quality interactions. While the emotional experience of a high-quality interaction may often be associated with objective measures of high-quality interactions, this will not always be the case” (Baker, Watlington, and Knee 2020, 330).
• “Rapport is a process, a happening, an experience between two persons. It may not be a mutual affair at first, but the sharing of the experience and participation in it grows as each individual unfolds him or herself in the interpersonal situation” (Travelbee 1963, 70).
• “Rapport is one’s capability to establish a background of relatedness and connecting with others” (Bakhshandeh 2002, n.p.).

According to Angelo (2012), rapport means “clicking” with one another, which would cause continued communication and collaboration between two people. Sometimes rapport is established immediately, and other times, it takes time to build the trust necessary to establish rapport. However, it takes two people to develop workable rapport. The successful performance of managers-as-coaches hinges on the rapport and trust existing between managers and those they coach (Whitmore 2017; Rothwell, Stavros, and Sullivan 2016; Cummings and Worley 2015; Bakhshandeh 2008).

Rapport means more than polite displays of friendship or casual civility and acquaintanceship. Establishing rapport is about showing emotional awareness—that is, having empathy, compassion, and connecting to others through understanding of another person’s emotions (Gilmore 2019; Whitmore 2017; Bakhshandeh 2009). “It is a connection that puts those on the same page and opens the door for collaboration, communication most importantly, deeper understanding” (Gilmore 2019, 2). Looking at all the presented definitions, it is safe to conclude that rapport is the individuals’ emotional connections and relationships with others in their lives. Establishing rapport is the step on which to build such connections and relationships based on mutual experiences or perceptions. When formed, it can persist for many years (Gilmore 2019; Angele 2012; Bakhshandeh 2009). As Travelbee (1963) underlined, “rapport is a particular way in which we perceive and relate to our fellow human beings; it is composed of a cluster of inter-related thoughts and feelings, an interest in, and a concern for others, empathy, compassion, and sympathy, a nonjudgmental attitude, and respect for the individual as a unique human being” (Travelbee 1963, 70).

Relatedness

Many people cannot manage their relationships because they are jumping into a relationship with another person before knowing how to relate and understand the deep meaning of relatedness. This phenomenon happens in both personal and professional environments (Bakhshandeh 2009).

Lexico dictionary of Oxford University defined relatedness as “the state or fact of being related or connected.” For example, “subjects reported a significant increase in the sense of relatedness to nature” (n.p.). Keller (2016) described relatedness as a reference “to the social nature of human beings and the connectedness with others. Both can be considered as being part of the panhuman psychology, and both are intrinsically intertwined” (1). Keller (2016) combined relatedness with autonomy as two basic human needs;

the definition of self and others can be regarded as embodying the two dimensions of autonomy and relatedness. Autonomy and relatedness are two basic human needs and cultural constructs at the same time. They may be differently defined yet remain equally important. The respective understanding of autonomy and relatedness is socialized during the everyday experiences of daily life routines from birth on

(1). According to Aristotelous (2019), there is convincing proof in the research literature suggesting that fostering relatedness among people through the formation of deeper human connections provides positivity in organizations and work settings. However, Aristotelous (2019) continued with, “at the same time, preserving our humanity and our sense of relatedness with one another at such times of unprecedented technological development seems a dau...