[MUSIC] Hello, and once again welcome. In this lesson, we'll define the coach role and explain why that role is important. I'll give you examples of managers coaching employees, and describe the pitfalls of overusing the coach role. So what is a coach manager? A coach manager is ultimately responsible for the performance, production, and engagement of employees. That's a lot in one small sentence, but let's talk about why that's an important role as managers to be coaches. There's certain things that we're finding in the marketplace in our employee talent pool that are different than they were even 15 years ago. The first thing is that we're expecting a tremendous amount of our employees now. There is a broad range of skill sets required. We expect our employees to be much more nimble, much more adaptable, much more capable of moving with the pace of change and influences in our organizations. We're seeing on going proof through literature and research that mangers who develop their employees get better results and get better performance. No longer can we expect that employees come to us completely cooked. That they already know everything they need to know. That just isn't the case. We used to have kind of a perspective that employees needed to figure it out and get it done. Well, I think that's still holding people accountable to performance is essential. But the go figure it out on your own part is changing, and employees are actually expecting managers to be more involved in helping them develop and improve skills. We need to recognize that our environments are ever-changing, and so the skills that are required, are as well. Things that you needed to know two years ago may be obsolete. So you have to learn new skills, you have to learn new methodologies, and you have to adapt new perspectives and behaviors to be successful today versus a few years ago. And lastly, many employees come to us with very high technical skills, but they have very undeveloped behaviors that support their performance. And I want to talk to you more about what that means. We tend to think of coaching and helping employees perform just in the realm of their skill set, their technical skill set, so engineering, accounting, finance, sales, marketing, analysis, these technical skills that our employees are trained to learn. What happens though is many employees come to us, and they have those skills down. [LAUGH] They have been well-trained, but they don't have necessarily all of the behaviors that lead to success like organization. How do they manage multiple priorities? Think about your work day. You have a lot of things you have to do every day, don't you? How did you learn how to do that? We make assumptions that people know how to do this. Listening skills. A lot of people are not ever taught how to listen to one another. How they communicate? Do we help people learn how to be effective in how they communicate? The words they use, the tone they use. There are opportunities for all of us to improve here. How well do employees accept and move with change. This is also something that many of our employees don't have experience in. And so they come into an organization that has rapid change, and they struggle. Working in teams is essential as all of you I'm sure know. But a lot of people, I'm sure you've met them, are not necessarily that great at collaborating and working with others. That is a coachable skill. It is a behavior. And lastly, even meeting deadlines. We have a lot of people that we manage who are highly creative. Highly talented, but maybe not as effective at meeting deadlines. So all of these are behaviors that often times managers are expected to develop in their employees. And yet they're not prepared to, because most managers think that employees come to them with technical skill, and they should know how to do all this other stuff, but the truth is a lot of our people, a lot of the people we work with, aren't very good at these behaviors. And that's where coaches manager is so vital. So let's look at an example of a coach as manager. There's a manager, his name is John, and he has an employee named Luke. Luke is tremendously talented, he has a extensive training and education in his field. But Luke lacks basic skills in working in a professional environment. So he's very smart and very experienced in his trade, but maybe not very experienced in his professional environment. John needs to help Luke gain self-awareness first, and then the skill set he needs in order to help him lead Luke to better performance. Sometimes, though, what happens is John has this talented technical person, and he gets frustrated with Luke because Luke doesn't have good skill sets to work in a professional environment. But, what I'm positioning here for you is the coach-as-manager recognizes both responsibilities. Now, the cool thing is, is that is what this whole course is about and I'm going to teach you, first of all, how to notice the difference, and how to address each as it relates to performance. Here's another example. Kay is the manager and Orlando is the employee. Orlando has been working in his field for years, he has extensive experience, and he is very capable. But recently, Kay's organization has been adding new processes and systems that require every employee to learn new skills. Orlando is having a hard time adapting to the new skills and to the change. As his coach manager, Kay must help identify how best to develop the essential new skills that Orlando needs, and how to help Orlando adapt to the changes if she wants the best performance from Orlando. And what we'll learn through our work together is we all learn a little bit differently, and so how she works with Orlando is through a coaching approach. What happens though, is sometimes the coaching role can be overused. Remember I said that we all have a preferred role, well, if your preferred role is coaching, you could place too much emphasis on development, and that could lead to a lack of accountability. Not holding people accountable to outcomes, but instead spending too much time just on development. Sometime people who are focused on a coaching manager role, they over analyze the gaps in their performance, they over think about why employee's aren't doing well, and they don't get about the business of implementing a solution. And sometimes, people who tend to overuse the coaching role will overcomplicate some very simple performance challenges. So my goal through this work we're going to do together is to give you the resources you need to make these diagnostic decisions quickly so that you can get about the business of writing performance as quickly as possible. So in summary, coaching is not well-defined, we know that. My guess is that you hear about it a lot, but you don't really know what it means. We're going to clear that up for you. The primary focus of coaching is to develop undeveloped skills in employees, and that's both from a technical perspective, and also from a behavioral perspective. And often times managers and coaches need to develop everything. They need to develop behavior skills, technical skills, and all the other options as it relates to how we help people produce and perform.
