The 5 Reasons Why Leaders Don’t Coach their Employees, and How to Overcome them
In this developing business world we’re in, having a coaching culture in the workplace is the best move an organisation can make to quickly adapt to this development environment. Having a coaching culture as mentioned in our previous articles, helps organisations nurture the talents and capabilities of their people thus improving their performances and making the organisation more effective in achieving their goals.
However, despite the positive outcomes, not all organisational leaders adopt to this culture coaching leadership style. Here are the top 5 reasons why:
1. They Leaders are not trained as coaches. They don’t have the skills and so lack confidence in their ability to coach.
2. They don’t want to make a mistake and get it wrong because they think that this might affect their current positions on the company.
3. They don’t have time. Their daily schedule is already full due to the increasing demands from their superiors and customers.
4. They don’t have the budget; there’s no allocation in the training budget that they can access.
5. They don’t know how to evaluate the success of a coaching program and are afraid to take risks.
All these are valid reasons for not starting out on the journey to coach your employees. However, when you look at these barriers, remember that many successful organisations also encountered these barriers and their success is a result of their courage and determination to overcome these barriers.
Let me show you how:
1. It starts at the top. Senior management makes a decision to focus on coaching throughout the organisation because they have heard about the enormous benefits that coaching delivers; benefits like:
• Organisations with a strong coaching culture have higher employee engagement (60% of employees rated as highly engaged compared with 48% of all other organizations).
• Organisations with a strong coaching culture report higher revenue growth (63% report being above their industry peer group in 2014 revenue compared with 45% of all other organizations).
• Over 60% of organizations report higher engagement levels for high-potentials with access to any of the three ways of coaching – by internal coaches, external coaches or line managers as coaches. (ICF survey, 2015)
2. A strategy is put in place, aligned with the business imperatives, and a budget is allocated to establish the requite systems, procedures and training necessary to ensure a successful start to the program, with recurrent funding dependent on the evaluation of the program.
3. The coaching program is monitored and evaluated by a senior manager who works with an operational coach (either internal or external) to record and report on program outcomes. Evaluation measures may include ROI (but typically not); more frequent measures include employee feedback (58%), coach feedback (42%) and performance appraisals (32%) (ICF, 2015).
Taking a step further will always be coupled by hindrances and challenges but you’ll never know what lies ahead of you if you don’t take risks and overcome your fears. Helen Keller said it best:
“Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.”
Being a coach sure is a challenging job to do. It requires commitment and skills. But once you’ve stepped out of your comfort zone and let go of what’s keeping you from doing it, you’ll become a natural.
If you want to incorporate coaching into your organisation and become a professional coach yourself, you can contact the Australian Institute of Professional Coaches 1 300 309 306 or email us at [email protected] . We look forward to speaking with you soon.
