Coaching Workers is Good Business:
Leaders Must Recognize the Value in Helping Employees
By Anita Bruzzese
Originally published in The Citizen-Times
September 1, 2000
When you go to work, do you feel like someone on the job
truly cares about your personal and professional growth?
If you do, then consider yourself lucky. Many American
workers don't receive any sort of commitment to them as an
integral part of the business they work for.
Here's another way of looking at it: companies make sure
their equipment runs correctly, keeping it functioning
smoothly with constant maintenance. And yet, some employers
don't even offer basic tune-ups to workers, let alone
making long-term commitments for improvement.
That's very frustrating to someone like Mark David, a San
Francisco-based executive coach for 20 years.
"Coaching today is needed more than ever," he said. "Adults
in the year 2000 have such a hard time asking for help
because corporations today have not stood up and said,
'When you ask for help we will see it as a sign of
strength.' "
Instead, David said it is clear that employers see asking
for aid as a "sign of weakness" so that those who cannot
seem to "swim" with the business are cast aside.
"They have just decided they don't have time for those who
are sinking. And yet all I hear from my clients is how
badly they need vision and coaching and leadership."
Why don't more companies offer coaching if everyone is
clamoring for it?
"I think leaders today don't think they're being paid to be
coaches, so they tell other managers that if they want to
be coaches, then they have to do it on top of everything
else. But what they need to do is go in like surgeons and
cut away some of the stuff a manager must do so that they
have time to be coaches."
Further, David said that good coaching needs a long-term
commitment just like any good relationship.
"Good coaches put other people first, and stick with their
vision every day. They don't say there is going to be
teamwork, and then when the day-to-day work hits, they
become autocratic and start telling people just to get the
work done the way they tell them. Coaches have to model the
correct behavior, every day."
David stressed that coaches don't have to be members of
management. He said that good peer coaches are often
workers with vast experience in a certain area, or those
who can use their own strength and common sense to support
and encourage other workers. In his self-published book,
Coaching Illustrated, he said he has used input from
clients and his own experience in the world of coaching to
offer several suggestions to making coaching successful.
Among them:
- Being truthful. Don't over promise, exaggerate or
speak before having all the facts.
- Building trust and respect. Coaches are not in a
popularity contest. That's a recipe for failure. Instead,
coaches make decisions based on what's best for the
company, not themselves or some other person.
- Building long-term partnerships. This is done by
periodically reviewing your vision as a coach, and by
understanding everyone's strengths and weaknesses - and
taking the time to just have fun.
David said he believes in the next 10 years there is
going to be an "implosion" in the American workplace
because of an increasing inability of people to
communicate.
"There is less information passing among people than ever
before, and we're hiding behind technology and losing our
interpersonal skills," he said. "Coaching is so important
because it shows people that you really do care. Coaches
help you avoid small problems turning into big ones. It
keeps problems from escalating." |
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