Put Me In, Coach! Developing Your People's Strengths

In The Daily Improviser, I’ve talked quite a bit about the power of focusing on strengths in creating personal development plans. Again, too many individuals (and their managers) tend to think of development planning as only a matter of shoring up one’s weaknesses. However, as the Strengths Based Development movement says, the best leverage comes from identifying your strong points and getting even better at using them.

This equating of “areas for development” with “weaknesses” has another downside as well: It undermines the power of performance coaching (usually referred to as simply “coaching”) as a tool for helping people succeed in their work and their personal lives.

Coaching is a collaborative process based on the foundational belief that people have the ability to solve their own problems and achieve their own goals. The role of a coach – whether a manager, a peer, or even a direct report who “coaches up” – is to help the coachee define his goal, clearly define the gap between that goal and the current reality, and then determine specific ways in which he can – and will – bridge that gap.

In a true coaching situation, the coachee identifies and drives toward his own solutions, while the coach facilitates the process through the use of powerful questions such as: What will success look and feel like? How important is this to you? What could you do to achieve it?

Coaching is particularly powerful when used in conjunction with a strengths-based approach. If a coachee has already clarified her own strengths and has charted her own development path toward a goal that utilizes those strengths, she is already thinking in terms of “owning” her own career plan. This makes the coach’s work both easier and more impactful, and the coachee’s success more likely – true leverage in action.

Unfortunately, many managers only attempt a coaching approach once an employee becomes a “Problem” with a capital “P.” By this point, the leverage opportunity is usually lost – the coach and coachee are now so focused on the coachee’s shortcomings (often in an adversarial, highly charged way) that any notion of the action as a collaboration is often quickly dispensed with. “Coaching” then becomes more of a performance-management event, something done to the employee rather than with her. In addition, the “coaching” becomes much more time-consuming for the manager.

When applied in this way, “coaching” gets a bad rap. Yes, if an employee reaches the true Problem stage, the manager must take action – but usually the action that’s taken can’t accurately be described as “coaching.”

To paraphrase the old ad tagline, “You can pay now or pay later.” Are you leveraging your coaching efforts early enough in your people’s development journey so that you can avoid the Problem pitfalls later on?

(For more information on Coaching, see the website of Corporate Coach U.)