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Conclusion: The Four-Step Coaching Process
#WhatTeamMembersSay
âMy manager currently treats members of the team inconsistently. She is close and friendly with two of them and spends most of her time chatting with them during the day. She snaps and issues orders at two others on the team and ignores the remaining team members for the most part. Among ourselves we discuss how we wish she would be more consistent with the way she treats people. Everyone deserves to have a manager who is supportive.â
âThrough the Eyes of the Team survey respondent
CONSIDER A FUTURE BUSINESS environment in which everyone knows that the most important driver of performance and growth is the effectiveness of their leadership team, and each leader has a clear way to quantify and measure the quality of their own work.
The following chart shows the average scores of two companies for a sample of questions from our Through the Eyes of the Team survey. As we do with all clients, we measured the companiesâ frontline coaches to quantify their coaching quality. The bottom score, in bold, shows the total average coaching score for the entire management team. While companies ABC and XYZ are in the same industry, XYZ produces greater revenue per salesperson, has greater sales growth over the prior year, has lower turnover, and more managers and salespeople are achieving their goals.
| | ABC | XYZ |
| My manager is effective at motivating to greater performance. | 70% | 82% |
| My manager holds one-to-one meetings with me at least twice a month. | 71% | 91% |
| My one-to-one meetings with my manager are beneficial. | 71% | 84% |
| My manager provides documented feedback at least quarterly. | 24% | 64% |
| My managerâs feedback helps me perform better. | 60% | 73% |
| I find great value in the information provided in team meetings. | 68% | 85% |
| My manager understands who I am as a person. | 58% | 75% |
| Even if itâs uncomfortable, my manager is effective at challenging my skills. | 57% | 71% |
| Organizational Coaching Quality Score | 62% | 75% |
Now assume you are a salesperson and have been offered a job with company ABC and with XYZ. Your choice seems obvious, as youâd want to work for the company that has the coaches who will create the most growth in you and for the company where you are more likely to hit your sales targets. If you are in a leadership role and both companies are offering you a position, it would also seem an easy decision, as youâd rather work alongside a high-performing team of coaches and in an environment where more managers achieve sales goals. Simply put, XYZ is the more attractive company.
Hereâs the twist: ABC and XYZ are the same company, measured less than one year apart. So what does this story tell us? Any organization, regardless of size, can implement a coaching process that leads to greater growth and increased revenue. However, there is a huge challenge to a change like this. All of a sudden, the coaches are the ones on the hook for delivering results. Itâs no longer just the frontline team members who are supposed to achieve their goals. The coaches have just as much responsibility, if not more, for executing the activities and behaviors that will deliver the numbers.
This concluding chapter will outline exactly how a coaching process should be implemented and executed in an organization to achieve growth above and beyond what is currently being achieved. We will illustrate the results of multiple companies that were committed and realized consistent growth. Weâll also share examples of companies that werenât as successful because we all know that is reality too. We will be candid about our experiences and what we have learned about companies that are not afraid of implementing and leading a coaching process that creates Complexity versus those that arenât willing or capable of leading through change and discomfort.
Before we detail the coaching process, we would like to acknowledge that there are other coaching duties we are not covering in this book. Hiring, compensation, planning, and technology implementation are all areas of responsibility for a coach. However, too often these responsibilities are not solely in the hands of the coach, as other departments like human resources, marketing, or finance take on a significant role. Instead, we are focused on the coaching interactions that are clearly within the control of the coach.
Further, our coaching process is solely focused on the coaching interactions that have been shown to lead to better results. While some teams may emphasize activities such as business unit reviews, planning meetings, or pipeline reviews, weâve yet to see a measurable performance difference between organizations that conduct these activities regularly and those that do not. Essentially, thereâs nothing in our data up to this point to indicate that these activities lead to greater discretionary effort. Weâre not saying they arenât important, but we are focused on the coaching interactions that our research has shown to have a relationship to increased performance. As we are constantly evaluating which coaching activities and behaviors drive performance, we will continue to look for connections between other coaching interactions and business results.
Finally, you are going to read how we at EcSell Institute implement a coaching process on behalf of our clients. This is not intended to be a self-promotional chapter but rather a way to illustrate how organizations, or departments within any organization, can implement a coaching methodology and the results they can achieve. The four steps we prescribe in this chapter are not so much revolutionary as evolutionary and can be followed by any company willing to execute them.
IMPLEMENTING A COACHING PROCESS
Throughout this book, we have focused on the behaviors and activities that high-growth coaches use to improve team performance. Youâve learned why both the quantity and quality of coaching matters, and how both affect immediate performance and sustained growth. Youâve seen disparity in performance between teams, sometimes measured in millions of dollars, who have a high-growth coach versus those whose coach behaves more like a traditional manager. Now itâs time to share how a business, division, or team can implement a coaching process that is teachable, measurable, and leads to the creation of more high-growth coaches.
There are four steps our clients have successfully used to implement their coaching processes and create high-growth coaching cultures. These steps are:
1.Measure
2.Educate and train
3.Implement
4.Track and analyze
The steps within the process, though independent, are inextricably linked. You cannot do just one of them and expect growth. As a matter of fact, doing only part of the preceding list could create negative discretionary effort. For example, to begin with measurement and not follow with education and training is paralyzing. What youâve done is shown your coaches their strengths and weaknesses but not offered a way for them to improve. To only educate and train, while attractive andâwhen done wellâexciting, yields minimal long-term impact. Indeed, training research shows that almost everything learned is lost in thirty days without accountability for implementation of what was learned. And to do the first three steps without tracking and analyzing results would be analogous to treating a cancer patient without follow-up scans to see if treatments were effective or how to next treat the patient. Simply put, if you want to build a high-growth culture, it takes consistent execution of the entire four-step process.
Step 1: Measure
I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.
âBILL GATES
Growth in coaching, growth in individuals, growth in outcomes, and growth in salesâthese are what our clients are looking for when they embark on a process for improving the execution of coaching within their company. Their growth is of paramount importance to us, too, which is why measurement is the essential first step in our four-step coaching process. Simply put, we begin with measurement to establish a baseline from which to assess progress and improvement over time.
WE BEGIN WITH MEASUREMENT TO ESTABLISH A BASELINE FROM WHICH TO ASSESS PROGRESS AND IMPROVEMENT OVER TIME.
The most important way that we measure our clientsâ coaching acumen and execution is by administering the Through the Eyes of the Team survey. By asking team members about the consistency and effectiveness of the coaching they receive, we are better able to understand their organizationâs current coaching environment. This not only helps us establish a baseline of performance but also allows us to tailor our recommendations and coaching process to better meet their needs.
Case Studies: Measurement
The experience of one our clients, a small, specialized pharmaceutical company, is indicative of the benefits that can be achieved through the measurement of coaching. The leadership team had established significant revenue growth goals for the years to come and believed that better mid-level leadership was required to achieve those goals. It decided to partner with us to ensure their coaches had a clearly defined coaching process to employ.
At the outset of our relationship, we surveyed about fifty team members and found that while coaching was happening in the organization, it was not as consistent or high quality as the organization expected. For example, when we asked team members to rate their coachâs overall skills as a manager on a scale of one to ten, with ten being high, only 44 percent of them gave their coach a nine or ten, indicating that fewer than half of the team members were highly satisfied with the coaching they were receiving.
Further, coaching was happening too inconsistently. For example, 23 percent of team members said they did one-to-one meetings with their coaches on a weekly basis, 15 percent said every other week, 38 percent said monthly, 16 percent said quarterly, and 8 percent said never. There was no clear standard or expectation, and senior leadership knew they had to be more consistent in their companyâs execution of this critical coaching practice.
Another information services client had a similar realization when it measured coaching for the first time. For example, when we surveyed more than three hundred team members about how often they received feedback from their manager on their skills, 23 percent said monthly, 17 percent said quarterly, 20 percent said twice a year, 24 percent said annually, and 17 percent said never. Moreover, 60 percent of team members rated the feedback they received as valuable, while the other 40 percent found it to be lacking in quality. It was eye-opening for senior leadership to see that the quantity and quality of the feedback their team members received differed so much depending on who was their coach.
The experience of these two companies is what we see at the measurement stage with many of our clients. Coaching is happening in the organization, but there are many inconsistencies in how often and how effectively itâs occurring. Most of the time, our client organizations have never even measured coaching before, so they have no idea of whether itâs even occurring or how well itâs being received by team members. Finally having this information gives them clarity about their current coaching effectiveness and how they need to improve.
Step 2: Educate and train
An individualâs current skill set is of secondary importance to their ability to learn new knowledge, skills, and behaviors that will equip them to respond to future challenges. As a result, our focus must shift to finding and developing individuals who are continually able to give up skills, perspectives, and ideas that are no longer relevant, and learn new ones that are.
EXCERPT FROM A CENTER FOR CREATIVE LEADERSHIP WHITE PAPER
In todayâs business environment, becoming complacent with your employeesâ current knowledge, actions, and skill sets is a surefire way to begin the demise of your organization. Continual developmentâgiving up old skills and learning new onesâis absolutely critical to individual and organizational growth. Without moving forward, Stagnation sets in.
Education and training, the second step in the growth coaching process, is a crucial component of a coachâs growth journey. But training is not without risk for an organization, with the key danger being starting and stopping with this step. Unfortunately, too many companies view education and training as stand-alone events that will single-handedly provide what is needed to create behavior change and growth outcomes. But as you learned in chapter 1, most peopleâs desire to stay in Order is intense. So despite what is learned at an educational event, that knowledge is often not applied and change is often not implemented. We are certainly not insinuating that organizations shouldnât provide education and training for their people. They just need to follow up and make sure whatâs learned in the training is actually implemented.
After weâve established an organizationâs coaching baseline with the Through the Eyes of the Team survey, we begin education on best practices. This part of our four-step process helps build emotional commitment to coaching improvement, so that coaches actually want to implement the new ideas they learn. Like all of us, the coaches with whom we work have preconceived notions and ideas that influence their thinking. Through their experiences with their own teams, learning from other leaders, and sometimes even previous management training, theyâve developed their own beliefs on how to best coach and lead their teams. While their experience can be valuable, we often find that coaches have been taught ineffective ideas about how to drive their teamâs performance. Even more often, we find that coaches simply havenât been adequately exposed to good modeling or information on how to coach their teams.
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