Even Michael Jordan had a coach, coaching your team is important if you want to drive continuous improvement. Effective coaching is a two-way street, where the coach offers to guide the individual and that person must cooperate and follow through. Essentially, the Coach helps the Coachee to come up with the solutions by highlighting performance improvement areas.
We have looked at coaching on several occasions but from the coaches perspective. As I considered this topic, I realized that not much has been said about the Coachee and that relationship cannot work without both parties active involvement. As an employee, are you ready to for coaching? What should you do to ensure that the coaching sessions are successful?
Here are my thoughts on how the Coachee can make the coaching successful.
1: Have A Willing Heart
A willing heart is a first and most important point. You should be willing to accept the coaching with your manager. Given the nature of coaching where you come up with the solutions to the problems, a willing heart will make the process smoother.
A willing heart means that you can take criticism and direction from someone else, and be flexible to use it for the benefit of the company. It will also benefit you as an individual and your career growth.
Without a willing heart, the process will be an uphill battle that can lead to hating the job or your manager instead of improving your performance.
“Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways: where is unwilling it will find a thousand excuses” Arlen Price
2: Be Committed
Coaching is a process that requires commitment, and when you are under fire or criticism, it is easy to give up. Complete commitment means believing you are worthwhile in terms of who you are and what you do. Your coach cannot make you commit to the process; it has to come from within.
Allowing yourself and our cause to have sufficient psychological and material resources to achieve your career goals is self-commitment. Without it, you will sabotage yourself by giving all sorts of excuses and negative self-talk.
Commit to the coaching process and the outcome will be great.
“Nothing will work unless you do.” John Wooden
3: Have Inner Strength
Your inner strength will take you miles ahead. When faced with a hard situation at work, how do you respond to it? You can react in two ways, meet with it head on and get a solution or break down. Having inner strength is your ability to control your emotional responses when under pressure and be able to concentrate on what is important.
For example, you are an account manager and you lose a key customer. This huge loss will make the leadership ask questions. Your immediate boss will call you for a meeting to figure out what went wrong and how can that customer be won back or how to improve what the company did not to repeat the same mistakes.
That is a coaching session, and your inner strength will help you put it together, look at every interaction you have had with the customers and come up with solutions to win them back. Without it, you will not even see where the problem is and the session will be futile.
4: Take Full Responsibility
Yes, take full responsibility for your actions and reactions. Remember that at work, when you are being coached, it is more of giving you directions and pushing in the right way. However, you cannot go anywhere if you do not acknowledge your mistakes and successes.
When you perform well, accept the applause’s, and when you perform poorly, own your mistakes and be the first to correct it. Your coach will be there to highlight your weak areas, and you can find the best ways to improve them.
Taking full responsibility requires you to be humble.
5: Respect your coach
Whose advice do you follow? The one you respect or the one you do not? I believe you will listen and follow someone that you respect. To benefit from the coaching, you need to respect your coach. Do not confuse respect with fear. When you fear someone, you will not be open to him or her. When you respect someone, you will be open and have constructive conversations.
In summary, when you have a willing heart, you are committed, you have inner strength, you take full responsibility and you respect your coach, the coaching will successful. Remember you are the beneficiary of the coaching.
Enjoy and be coachable!
This blog was written by Jim Iyoob, Chief Customer Officer for Etech Global Services. If you would like to learn more about Etech, please contact us at info@etechgs.com.
