The benefits of coaching are many; 80% of people who receive it say they have greater confidence in themselves and more than 70% benefit from better work performance, relationships and more effective communication skills. In the first three months with a coach, BetterUp members see a 38% decrease in the number of languishes. Among other dimensions of mental health, they improve life satisfaction, purpose, and social connection. These, together with emotional regulation, reliably improve the mental health of coaching participants.
Coaching, in its simplest form, means training, mentoring, or providing instruction. It's an excellent skill that can be used to improve growth and performance, as well as to promote individual responsibility and accountability. Performance coaching is an ongoing process that helps build and maintain effective relationships between employees and supervisors. Performance coaching can help identify an employee's growth, as well as to plan and develop new skills.
Using their coaching skills, supervisors assess and address the development needs of their employees and help them select diverse experiences to acquire the necessary skills. Supervisors and employees can work collaboratively to develop plans that may include training, new tasks, job enrichment, self-learning, or job details. Effective coaching goes beyond simply teaching how to do a job. It's also teaching someone how to think and develop strategies.
Asking open-ended questions and allowing employees the autonomy necessary to take some reasonable risks will help them increase their self-confidence so that they can find alternative solutions to work problems. Whether it's an impromptu training moment or a formal training conversation, these are the five steps to effective training. The coach brings a committed experience, bringing insight, perspective and a growth mindset to the coaching relationship. In addition, this five-step coaching model is presented in a linear way to represent a complete coaching conversation.
In the last million coaching sessions with BetterUp members, we've learned a lot about how to deliver positive and reliable coaching results for all types of people. Training is a key factor in the development of your workforce, so every internal development plan must not only include training, but also teach your managers and supervisors how to train effectively. This is a key step in any coaching conversation and requires the coach to ask insightful questions, listen actively, be comfortable with silence, and view the situation from multiple perspectives. Just as you train your team towards the goal of personal development, your development as a coach is also part of a larger picture.
Coaching involves giving feedback to employees, so coaches can't be reticent about receiving feedback for themselves. Keep in mind that the coaching process is based on the assumption that coaching is more about asking than about telling. However, asking open and comprehensive follow-up questions is critical to helping create a safe, accurate, and positive environment for coaching participants to open up, discover themselves, and work effectively with the coach.
