Why Do Manages and Supervisors Find Performance Coaching Difficult?

As firms become more competitive and the need for high performance teams become a necessity, organizational leaders have come to understand the impact coaching has on employee performance as well as its impact on the results of the firm.  For this reason, firms have begun to include the ability to coach and develop others as a required competency of their managers.  In theory, as a result of performance coaching, these firms would become more efficient and able to compete at lower costs as employees take more responsibility for their performance while maintaining a personal concern for the success of the firm. 

Defined as a process used to encourage employees to accept responsibility for their own performance, enable them to achieve and sustain superior performance, and to treat them as partners in working toward organizational goals and effectiveness, coaching requires mangers to take an interest and interact with subordinates.  Unfortunately, with such limited time devoted to performance coaching, managers find it difficult to complete the process while some are simply reluctant to attempt performance coaching at all.  Factors leading up to the reluctance and difficulty of these managers may rest in their inability to utilize the elements essential to effective performance coaching; communication and interpersonal skills.     

If coaching is to be successful, managers must embrace the skills of communication.  Because coaching happens through conversations and human interaction, the skill of communication is vital to the learning process.  While it is easy for managers to lecture the employee about performance improvement, coaching requires an exchange of ideas and opinions between the coach and trainee.   Moreover, the coaching manager must have the ability to listen with the intent to understand a person’s thinking and motivation.  By learning a person’s thoughts and perspectives on various topics, managers can make the appropriate connection between the individual’s personality and to the desired performance the coaching process is aimed at improving.  In addition to active listening, being specific and descriptive in communicating with employees also enables the coaching process.  When managers are specific and descriptive, the greater the chance that an employee will understand what is expected and will offer less resistance to coaching.

Managers may also find coaching difficult because of the level of interpersonal skills required to be successful.  Often referred to as people skills or soft skills, interpersonal skills during performance coaching emphasize the need for managers to demonstrate a level of commitment and respect towards the employee.  Employees who believe their manager is genuinely interested in their successes and want to see them succeed is likely to seek out coaching and make an honest effort to improve. Coaching is most effective when it comes in a spirit of helpfulness instead of simply finding fault or correcting behaviors.    

Understanding that managers may not have developed the appropriate levels of interpersonal and communication skills to effectively engage in performance coaching, firms have developed training programs and activities to assist managers in unlocking the potential of their employees.  To help the coaching manager develop his or her communication skills, an approach called micro-skills communication training, is a program that gives managers and supervisors the necessary tools to effectively coach employees.  Involving the basic attending skills of feedback, paraphrasing, reflection of feeling, open and closed questioning, and focusing, the micro-skills training isolates the specific verbal and nonverbal skills that make up effective communications.  To improve interpersonal skills, training programs involving role playing, modeling films, and workbook exercises have been created by human resource development (HRD) professionals to assist managers with developing the appropriate interpersonal skills needed for effective coaching.  Performance coaching focuses on helping people learn in ways that allows that person to continue learning even after the coaching period has ended.