Coaching & Mentoring to New Opportunities

As a manager in today’s economic climate, now is the most critical time to coach and mentor your employees.  Coaching and mentoring can be a major challenge for most managers as they need to fit this in between running and planning the day-to-day and future development of the business.  Coaching and mentoring your employees allows you maximize the most from each employee while maintaining a structure of policies and procedures that most business needs adherence to.  Coaching and mentoring will help sustain long term growth, maintain long term employees and provide your customers with that exceptional experience they crave.

To identify opportunities within your business model refer to one of the five basic identifiers;

1      You identify an opportunity for one of your employees.

2      One of your employees acknowledges an opportunity for them self.

3      Sales or service customer or one of your long term vendors asserts to you a new opportunity.

4      You or your management team recognizes an opportunity that may exist to expand upon
     within your current team of employees.

5      A unique (good or bad) situation presents a new opportunity.

Different opportunities may present themselves during daily routine work or when a mishap occurs or some new opportunities present themselves during your bi-annual performance review...

Your job as a leader or manager is to expose opportunities and act upon them. The question is, “Do you have the time to assess your employees and your department and will you even recognize opportunities as they are presented to you”? 

To find an opportunity you must write down what the desired results are that you’re looking for within your department or within the core of your employees.  The next part of the process is to see in your mind’s eye what the outcome of your execution of the opportunity will bring to the business.  Does it bring about positive change or results?  Always start at the beginning of this exercise with the end desired results in mind.  Not knowing what the desired outcome really is will lead you to develop the opportunity in the wrong direction.  This may lead to frustration and confusion within your team and stifle your results even further.

Once you know what the desired end result will be, your job as the manager or leader is convey this to your team in a clear and concise fashion.  There should be absolutely no mistake in anyone’s mind the new direction the business is moving towards.  Your coaching and mentoring during this critical stage is where the transfer of ownership comes into play.  Explain the opportunity to your employees in such a way that they will want to execute the opportunity to make their jobs easier.  Once they understand this fact, they own the process.  This is when your employees become engaged and motivated in the initiation, execution and long term vitality of a new process brought about by opportunity.

If you invigorate your team with the knowledge that they can and will succeed and you explain the benefits to them in a detailed concise discussion you want hear later on the road that resist change.  The only time people in general resist change is when one of three following factors happen:

1. They don't see the need
2. They don't want to do it
3. They believe that change is not possible for them

Therefore there are four things you can do to counteract the three things your employees may do in resisting change.  You need to stay focused, be adamant and keep utilizing the four qualities that exemplify you as their leader or manager.

1. Continue to provide leadership
2. Continue to provide constant quality communication
3. Continue building trust by giving compliments or structure when and where needed
4. Continue getting their commitment while giving yours

To obtain a buy in factor you will need to guide your employees but more importantly you will need to obtain their personal commitment to the opportunity process.  You will also need to transfer and make available resources that may include your time, money, training, specialized equipment and informational handouts.  Having the backing of the GM or the dealer will also enhance the urgency in implementing your new opportunity initiatives.  Make sure you deliver on your promises to this endeavor otherwise you may be setting yourself up for failure from the word go.

Professional psychologists state it takes twenty-eight days of repetitiveness to exact change in a person’s behavior.  It is no different in the business world, training and retraining until the execution is done right, the same way each time will enhance the initiative and help in breaking old habits.  Ensure each member of the team has sufficient training, coaching and mentoring during the execution phase and keep praising them for job well done.  Praise reinforces a positive end result and makes employees more willing to go the extra mile to get it done right.

People inherently do what they have always done, even if it’s the wrong way, this means people don’t do what they know to be right, they just keep doing it the same old way.  The recipe for disaster and the definition of insanity is, “Doing things the same way as you’ve always done them, expecting different results”.  If you don’t reinforce everyday their commitment and your ongoing coaching and mentoring, things will slowly drift back to way things have always been done.  Practice makes perfect and you need to lead by example.

Empower your employees to get the desired results while they are learning new skill sets.  Make sure you are always giving the right form of feedback, even in the midst of some mistakes, counter them by stating things like, “I know sometimes change is hard, but keep up the effort and you will get results”.  Follow up each day and verify what it is you’ve coached into them.  Inspect what you expect!  Making sure you deal with non performance issues or nay Sayers quickly and efficiently to get on with the project, this will bring about change more rapidly. 

As I stated earlier to learn a new task or to change behavior takes twenty-eight days, therefore you will need to provide praise and recognition for this length of time along with coaching and mentoring techniques.  Make sure to always provide positive feedback and recognize people’s strengths and talents.  Providing employees positive feedback will ultimately reward you with positive results.

David