When motor dealers get coaching, it enhances their performance. Coaching can benefit anyone, not just athletes.
Just like athletes, leaders are under pressure to perform every workday. And just like with athletes, coaching is the best way to ensure that leaders can perform at a high level.
Workplace coaching is a burgeoning industry with a growing body of literature to support it. Here, we’ll break down workplace coaching, how it works, and how you can use it to help grow your garage.
Coaching enables leaders to deal with the unknown.
The workplace and the market are dynamic environments characterized by variable forces. Pursuing goals and inspiring employees for peak performance can drain the energy out of motor repair business owners. Therefore, getting coached is an important part of their growth. And then, they would want to apply the same approach to their team members.
Coaching can be contrasted with a “command and control” leadership style (Grant, 2017). A command-and-control leader is highly directive, decides without consultation, rewards performance, and punishes failure (Wheatley, 1997).
Command and control can be effective in some situations; for instance, when the task at hand is well defined or the organization is small enough that micromanaging is possible. Another approach is needed when tasks are ambiguous and teams are too large to control.
Coaching allows the leader to elicit the strengths and knowledge of the people they are leading. This frees leaders to focus on the big picture, prevents micromanaging, and allows employees to prove their competency.
Two prominent types of workplace coaching are executive coaching and team coaching.
Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular explain the different coaching styles in their 2019 article “The Leader as Coach.” They spotlight four different coaching styles:
In a study measuring leader effectiveness, Thach (2002) found that executives who received six months of coaching increased their effectiveness by 55% when rated by their peers in a 360-degree feedback survey.
The coaching in this study comprised a series of one-on-one coaching sessions provided by an external coach. This type of coaching can contribute to a company coaching culture, which positively affects the entire organization.
Teams are at the core of how organizations get things done. A literature review investigating both internal and external team coaching found that coaching had a positive effect on team effectiveness and productivity (Traylor et al., 2020).
Coaching was found to be more effective for teams that were struggling with communication, reflection, and self-correction. Coaching was found to improve productivity through mediating factors such as psychological safety (Traylor et al., 2020).
Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that they will accomplish the task at hand. It is a cognitive estimate of a person’s own ability to perform. This belief impacts both stress levels and actual performance.
In an experiment comparing a control group to an experimental group of managers who received coaching, the coached managers reported significantly higher levels of self-efficacy (Leonard-Cross, 2010).
Coached managers also reported feeling more aware of their strengths and weaknesses after the engagement (Leonard-Cross, 2010). With a more accurate view of themselves, these managers felt more prepared to take on challenges.
Mentoring is a protected relationship that supports learning and experimentation and helps individuals develop their potential.
A mentoring relationship is one where both mentor and mentee recognise the need for personal development. Successful mentoring is based upon trust and confidentiality.
Mentors may enter a long term mentoring relationship or may be called upon to act as a one-step mentoring advice point for a specific topic. In all roles, the mentor will act as an independent source of career advice and support. Training is available for both mentors and mentees and is strongly advised before entering into any form of a mentoring relationship.
Long term formal mentoring involves a number of meetings with the same mentor over a period of time. As either mentor and mentee you will be participating in a formal University of Southampton mentoring program and you will both have agreed to a level of commitment to the program. This gives you both the chance to get to know each other, and therefore the mentor can tailor how they share their experience and give encouragement.
If you have a specific need you can select a mentor with experience in that specialist area to meet with once (or more if you wish!)
There are currently many informal mentoring relationships within the University. An important advantage of having undertaken mentoring training, even for informal mentoring relationships, is that there will be a shared understanding of the mentoring process for both mentor and mentee.
To distinguish between coaching and mentoring, let’s look at the roots of these approaches.
Coaching usually bolsters an existing skillset, and it is more formal. Coaching helps people to hone the skills they already have and excel at something they are already doing.
Mentoring is a more informal process where the mentor is an expert in a particular area and passes on know-how and skills the mentee doesn’t have in a more directive manner.
Top performers are unlikely to engage in mentoring but may engage in coaching.
Consulting is more than giving advice.
Consulting includes a broad range of activities, and many consultants often define these practices quite differently. One way to categorize the activities is the professional area of expertise (such as competitive analysis, corporate strategy, operations management, or human resources).
Another approach is to view the process as a sequence of phases—entry, contracting, diagnosis, data collection, feedback, implementation, and so on. However, these phases are usually less discrete than most consultants admit.
Clarity about goals influences an engagement’s success. Here are consulting’s eight fundamental objectives:
The lower-numbered purposes are better understood and practised. They are also more frequently requested by clients. Many consultants, however, aspire to the higher levels on the pyramid than most of their clients target to achieve.
Purposes 1 through 5 are generally considered legitimate functions, though some controversy surrounds purpose 5. Management consultants are less likely to address purposes 6 through 8 explicitly, and their clients are not as likely to request them. But leading firms and their clients are beginning to approach lower-numbered purposes in ways that involve the other goals as well.
Goals 6 through 8 are best considered by-products of earlier purposes, not additional objectives that become relevant only when the other purposes have been achieved. They are essential to effective consulting even if not recognized as explicit goals when the engagement begins.
Moving up the pyramid toward more ambitious purposes requires increasing sophistication and skill in the processes of consulting and in managing the consultant-client relationship. Sometimes a professional tries to shift the purpose of an engagement even though a shift is not called for; the firm may have lost track of the line between what’s best for the client and what’s best for the consultant’s business.
But experienced consultants do not try to prolong engagements or expand the scope. If the needs grow, both parties may move on to other goals.
At The Garage Mentor, we understand your points and objectives and apply the most suitable approach to assist you in achieving the desired results.