Blogs

Businesses with good coaches are better placed to foster skills development, build a positive work environment, reduce employee attrition rates, retain critical internal knowledge, and cultivate invaluable goodwill within their industries. These benefits all contribute to making organisations more effective and more survivable in the face of ever-increasing global market volatility. 

Given this, leaders with proficiency in critical developmental skills such as coaching and feedback can provide their organisations with immense value that exceeds whatever they can bring to the table with their individual technical or managerial talents. While there is no single “correct” approach to coaching and providing feedback, there are several key coaching principles that can significantly contribute to successful outcomes. Here, we’ll look at some important best practices to help leaders become better coaches to their teams.

1) Set clear and unambiguous expectations
Nearly every management how-to will tell you to set expectations early on, for many good reasons. When expectations are explicit, team members can prioritise their time much more effectively, as they will waste less time doing unnecessary guessing and busywork. This makes setting expectations inseparable from sound team performance management.
 
However, many managers fail to understand that setting expectations involves much more than just telling team members to meet certain key performance indicators. When setting expectations, managers also need to account for the cultural backdrop as well as the competencies, values, and personality types of each team member. This is because what is unambiguous to some people may not necessarily be that way to others.

Accounting for diversity is especially important in Singapore, where many individuals may be primed to avoid talking and confrontation due to existing cultural norms that emphasise harmony and community. Taking those factors into account ensures that leaders are better able to set expected standards for team performance.

2) Help team members set goals
Building on the previous point, it is equally important for leaders to empower their team members to improve their goal setting and action-planning capabilities. Through coaching, leaders can guide their team in setting clear and meaningful goals—objectives that are aligned and in tune with organisational objectives. They can help their team members identify specific and measurable targets, while also aiding them in prioritising tasks and developing action plans to achieve these targets. 

Giving feedback, on the other hand, allows leaders to provide timely and constructive input on the progress and quality of goal execution. It enables them to recognise their team member’s individual strengths, while also being able to offer guidance for improvement.

3) Build genuine rapport
Positive emotional connections are the basis for trust, an important ingredient for meaningful coaching sessions. Without rapport, you might find it difficult to create a safe space for your team members to explore their thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours. If you try to fake rapport, chances are that your team members will become cynical about further attempts at structured skills development.
 
Given this, leaders who want to elicit good results from coaching must strive to develop some kind of genuine connection with team members. This can be a delicate balancing act, as overfamiliarity can undermine a leader’s authority. With this in mind, they should exercise proper judgement when building rapport with different members of their team, taking their personalities and the professional environment fully into account.

4) Give feedback wisely
In 2019, the Harvard Business Review published a controversial piece titled “The Feedback Fallacy”. The article deconstructed the underlying assumption that frank feedback is important for eliciting improvement, pointing out many weaknesses of most management teams’ feedback systems.
 
One of the important points was centred around research results that showed that more than 50% of one’s ratings of someone else reflect one’s own characteristics. This means that leaders have to be cognisant of their own biases when doing coaching sessions—something that is not universal by any means. 
 
Another important point is that harsh criticism can trigger a fight or flight response in people’s brains, inhibiting learning rather than facilitating it. This means that stressful feedback structures such as traditional annual or biannual reviews are often highly ineffective at bringing about desired changes in behaviour.

One other important point is the value of positive feedback. Leaders will almost certainly fail to get sustainable results by pointing out failures. To ensure that a coachee continues improvement, it’s often more helpful to praise successes or desired behaviours and explain how that helps the rest of the team.

5) Respond to concerns as soon as possible
If a team member brings up a productivity issue or if someone’s behaviour needs correcting, it’s unwise to wait for a long time to address it. Leaders have to be prepared to undertake feedback and coaching sessions before the issue has a chance to seriously undermine the team’s performance. 

Team members will be rightly aggrieved if months-old issues are brought up with them for the first time at an annual review rather than when the issue was still relevant. The lack of timely coaching will also allow the issue to continuously degrade the individual’s and the team’s performance up until the time of the regularly scheduled review, which could lead to unacceptable operational conditions in the meantime.

6) Encourage real dialogue between team members
Aside from earning the rapport of individuals in their charge, leaders should also encourage team members to build friendly or, at least, cordial relationships with each other. This not only helps foster teamwork and knowledge-sharing, but it also helps to avoid potential conflicts that could interfere with professional development and productivity.

7) Keep tabs on everyone’s growth
It can be tough to get a good idea of just how much a team has progressed or how to coach them if you don’t have a baseline to start from. Measuring progress ensures that you are better able to set clear and realistic goals.

When possible, track your team’s performance in as transparent and unobtrusive a way as possible. Some forms of close monitoring can actually negatively affect performance by degrading trust and increasing anxiety among team members. 

8) Recognise milestones
The meaningful recognition of performance milestones is important for several reasons. First, it helps reinforce the kinds of positive behaviours that help your team exceed its limits. Second, it helps build the confidence that each individual needs to stay motivated. Third, recognition also provides opportunities for reflection and learning throughout the entire team. Lastly, giving team members the recognition they deserve can help instil a sense of loyalty, creating a positive environment that reduces turnover and encourages individuals to go above and beyond out of their own volition.

9) Learn from your team
While you might be in charge, you aren’t necessarily the smartest, most experienced, or even the most qualified person in your team. Leaders should always be open to learning from the individuals they manage, as it will not only help them drive team performance but it should also help them become better-rounded leaders.

Final thoughts
While there are some good guidelines to aid leaders in their journey, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to effective coaching and feedback. Not only are these leadership and developmental areas ongoing processes, but they are deeply human activities as well. 

As such, leaders should not think of themselves as traditional bosses or simple order-givers. Rather, they have a responsibility to take a keen interest in the unique, ever-changing needs and dynamics of their team. This means it’s important to regularly revisit and adjust one’s approach and to use one’s experience, training, and good judgement to the team’s full benefit. It would also be beneficial to consider taking coaching classes like NTUC LearningHub’s The Coaching Essentials, The Developing Coach, and The Practicing Coach courses. Enrolling in such courses can benefit leaders by enhancing their communication and interpersonal skills, improving their ability to motivate and inspire their teams, helping them develop effective problem-solving strategies, and allowing them to foster a growth mindset.

Reach out to our Skills Consultants to find out more about how you can transform your life through learning today!