How Can you Manage Performance and Strengthen Engagement as a Coach?

This is an edited extract from Coaching as a Leader by Nuha Al Moosa.

Once goals have been agreed it’s important to continually review progress and strengthen engagement, spotting opportunities for learning and coaching along the way. This is where your leader coach perspective and skills can accelerate your impact. Every interaction you have with someone for whom you have managerial responsibility is an opportunity to increase engagement, enhance performance and strengthen belonging. One of the greatest tools in your toolkit to do this is the regular check-in.

Regular team coaching check-ins

Regular weekly or monthly check-ins are important for you to engage individually with team members, review progress and navigate challenges. A simple structure for you to use as a leader coach is to ask your team members three questions:

• What’s going well? This gives an opportunity to celebrate success and reinforce learning.
• Where are you stuck? Spotting challenges early on will help to problem solve and coach your team member to develop their problem-solving skills.
• How can I help? Showing your support helps team members learn how to leverage your skills and experience and develops trust and psychological safety.

By regularly using this structure your team members will expect each check-in to be a useful conversation. This approach supports their performance and progress and shows that you care about them as an individual.

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA)

One of the tools you can use in your regular check-ins to track progress with individuals or a team, is Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). This is a method you can integrate with a coaching approach by asking open questions to enhance the quality of thinking and capability of your team.

• Are we on track?
• What got in the way?
• How could we tackle this situation?
• What could we do differently?
• How can I support?

PDCA is a useful tool to proactively review performance informally prior to a more formal review, which may happen at mid-year as well as the end of the year. By checking in on employees’ emotions as well as performance, you are demonstrating care towards their wellbeing and strengthening a sense of purpose and passion.

Choosing what approach to take – situational leadership

There are situations where an approach other than coaching is needed. For example, if an employee is doing something for the first time or doesn’t have the capability or knowledge to achieve a goal, you may need to give direction and guidance rather than coaching. Alternatively, consider a situation where an employee is highly skilled but isn’t performing at the level you’d expect. A directive style is unlikely to be effective, instead you’ll need to understand what is getting in the way. A framework that can help you determine what approach to take with different team members is situational leadership originally created by thought leaders in management and organizational behaviour Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard. It prompts you to think about your employees in terms of their ability and motivation. It proposes that you need to adapt your approach with each person based on their level of ability and motivation in each situation. You need to be able to direct, coach, participate or delegate depending on the situation. It has a short-term and long-term focus and is especially useful when performance or progress has stalled or when you are leading a new employee.

1. Telling, directing or guiding. Use when an employee has low levels of ability or experience in what they are working on, as well as low motivation or confidence. You give clear direction and guidance on how to proceed. In the short term, this approach creates momentum. It’s more directive than a typical coaching approach; however, it is still sometimes needed. Use it sparingly; if you find yourself needing to frequently direct someone over a long period of time, it could be a sign of poor performance or poor fit for the role.
2. Selling, coaching or explaining. Use when an employee has low levels of ability or experience in what they are working on but is highly motivated to learn. You give clear direction and recognize the enthusiasm and commitment of the employee, giving plenty of opportunities for discussion and development.
3. Participating, coaching or facilitating. Use when an employee has a high level of ability but isn’t making progress due to a low level of motivation or confidence. You explore what the barriers are to performance and coach any areas of stuck-ness. This is a follower-driven approach. If you become ‘stuck’ with needing to use this approach with someone over a longer time period, consider why this is. You may need to take a different approach.
4. Delegating, empowering or motivating. Use when an employee has a high level of ability and is motivated and confident in what they are doing. You build on what the person is learning through open questions and help them identify improvements.

The situational leadership framework helps you to adapt your approach to the individual and situation, rather than assuming a coaching approach will work all the time. It is useful for determining your approach in the short term and a valuable framework to have in your toolkit, especially to help you examine the fit between your leadership style and an employee’s level of skill and motivation in a specific situation.

Leadership Feedback

It’s important to maintain ongoing dialogue between you and your employees and to give frequent feedback on both their performance and behaviour in a structured and timely manner. This reinforces success and encourages employees to build on what’s working well. Constructive feedback is essential so that team members know when they need to change their approach and understand the impact they are having on others or their progress towards their goals. Sometimes it’s tempting to hold back from giving constructive feedback through a fear of damaging a relationship or a discomfort with any potential disagreement or conflict.

The great news is that by using your leader coach skills in all aspects of your leadership you are creating the conditions for honest, transparent and future-focused conversations. This makes it easier to give and receive feedback and give the tougher messages in a way that shows you care about the people who work for you. The SEED model is a structure that can help you frame feedback and can be useful to plan how to give constructive feedback as well as feedback and appreciation about great work:

• Set the scene: bring the conversation back to the incident or behaviour that happened.
• Explain your understanding: be simple and factual in your explanation of what you observed.
• Explore other perspectives: offer the employee an opportunity to tell you their side of the story and seek evidence.
• Determine the next steps: discuss the way forward.

The key is to focus on the event or behaviour to enhance performance and develop individual team members.

Understanding individual differences

Walking in the shoes of your team members is important because it helps you understand what they need from you to perform at their best. The most powerful thing you can do is to listen intently and pay attention – to what they say, don’t say, body language, facial expression and tone of voice, as well as the words they use. Each of us is shaped by our own unique life experiences, which have formed our underlying beliefs and identity (see Chapters 1 and 2 for a deep exploration of what shapes us). As a leader coach there are many frameworks that can help you understand individual differences, such as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is based on Carl Jung’s theories of personality development and the role of the unconscious. The MBTI defines eight preferences; how we are energized (introversion and extraversion), how we process information (sensing and intuition), how we make decisions (thinking and feeling) and how we interact with the world around us (perceiving and judging).

There are many frameworks that can help you as a leader coach to appreciate individual differences. The MBTI is just one example. Whichever you use, make sure that you use it as a source of insight to help build deeper understanding of your team and awareness and appreciation of difference. Tools like this can also build transparency and trust with your team, especially when you also openly share your profile with them.

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