Why Personal Coaching Is Essential to Business Success Today

These days, there are so many different perks your business can offer to attract top talent. More paid time off, more schedule flexibility, better retirement and healthcare packages — but the one perk your company cannot operate without is personal coaching.

Personal coaching is a business training method that gives employees direct access to the most experienced members of your organization. Why is this such an essential service, and how can you implement personal coaching to the highest effectiveness? Read on to find out.

1. Personal Coaching Helps Employee Empowerment

As a business leader, you benefit from an empowered workforce. Empowered employees are confident and capable of solving problems and accomplishing tasks without your direct oversight, which means you can have more time and energy for other business leader responsibilities.

Because coaching helps you foster the right skills in your workforce, you can empower your teams through coaching.

2. Personal Coaching Improves Employee Engagement

Engagement is an element of the relationship an employee develops with their employer. When engagement is high, a worker feels much more connected to the goals and values of the organization.

Coaching can help strengthen the connection employees feel toward the company, which in turn increases the employee’s satisfaction and drive to see the company succeed.

3. Personal Coaching Boosts Employee Performance

Coaching is the first and most important phase of the performance management process, and it has the greatest impact on immediate and lasting worker performance.

By assigning individual employees to coaches within business leadership, you can ensure that every worker has access to guidance and assistance when they need it. Then, managers can stay on top of their tasks as well, knowing that employees are continuing to learn and grow through coaching structures.    

4. Coaching Encourages Employee Commitment

Organizations that put effort into coaching tend to see that effort returned from employees. Workers understand and appreciate when their employers invest in their abilities.

Additional training is expensive and time-consuming, and employers always run the risk that their workers will leave and offer their improved skills to competitors. Fortunately, coaching drives commitment in the workforce, increasing the likelihood that workers will stay, contributing their skills and knowledge to organizational success.

5. Personal Coaching Is Easy to Implement

Any organization can integrate coaching into its culture of management — but first, business leaders need to recognize that managing and coaching are not synonymous.

Managing is looking after the administrative tasks associated with overseeing a team, and coaching is helping cultivate the right skills and knowledge with that team to ensure the organization thrives.

Here are a few simple changes you can implement within your business leadership to harness the power of coaching today:

i). Speak last — or not at all.

Coaching is about allowing team members to learn and grow without your direct supervision and involvement. If you speak first, your authority will automatically shut down members of your team who have ideas.

Thus, you should stay as quiet as possible during brainstorming meetings to give your team the opportunity to explore their own concepts and solutions.

ii). Inquire about thought processes.

Sometimes employees develop good ideas by chance, not by skill. By asking employees to explain the thought process that led to their good idea, workers are forced to consider the benefits and downsides of an idea.

Being asked to do this repeatedly will train this skill in your workers, so they are more deeply considerate of ideas before they present them.

iii). Empower with decisions.

Often, employees are denied the opportunity to make decisions until they reach the management level. By trusting workers with key decisions, you are allowing your team to learn from mistakes, gain confidence and generally improve their ability to work autonomously.

iv). Use emotional intelligence.

Your staff are not machines; as humans, your team members will have emotional responses to some elements of the workplace.

Unfortunately, few people are skilled at identifying the cause of emotional distress. You need to be able to use your emotional intelligence to reduce conflict and encourage productivity.

As soon as you start coaching, you will see top talent flocking to your job openings and remaining in their roles for years to come. Businesses of any size can start coaching their workers today, which means all these benefits and more are within your reach.