Introduction

Coaching helps the company gain greater profits by investing in their employee’s character and skills. This does not mean that you have to spend so much to increase employee effectiveness. But with coaching, staff can gain greater insight and becomes empowered to solve their challenges at the workplace.

The challenge is that becoming a coach is not easy. It also takes time and training. Here are some mistakes a coach should avoid.

Common Mistakes a Coach Does

1. Fixing the other person: Coaching is not done to change your staff or the team working for you. It is done to guide and empower your staff. Being aggressive in changing their behaviour nor their personality will bring more conflict between you and your employee.
2. Delaying: Some managers will always say they need to find the right time to coach their staff. It’s either they’ll say that they’re going to do it after several meetings and then eventually forget about it or too tired even to initiate it. Instead of always finding the “right” time, do it when opportunity already comes. For example, the staff comes to you for signature; you can already ask them questions or check how they’re doing.
3. Too much talking: Coaching is not about the coach or the manager. It’s about the person you’re trying to empower, and that’s your staff. Also, silence is sometimes necessary for conversations. For example, after you say something and your team is just quiet, then just let it be for a few minutes. You don’t need to talk too much. At the same time, coaching requires someone ready to listen to the other person also. It’ll be hard to understand where the person is coming from if you don’t hear them out.
4. Not being assertive: Coaches should know what to speak and how to speak it. Being assertive means, you know what words to say without condescending anyone, especially if it’s feedback about work. It’s okay if you’re intention is to improve their performance, but if done incorrectly, can resolve to resentment.
5. Overly giving advice: Giving them a lot of recommendation will not be helpful because you’re just making them more dependent on you, rather than thinking for themselves. This will make them passive instead of being proactive. When coaching someone, make sure that you know your boundaries and what kind of information you would want to share with them. It’s not coaching if they’re not able to resolve issues by themselves.
6. Not asking the person how you can help: This is a common mistake because some would coach their employee without really dealing with the current issues they are dealing with. Before you start coaching them, you must ask them first any pressing matters they want to talk about.
7. Creating assumptions without understanding your staff first: You are not there to judge them without hearing what they have to say too. It’s easy to make assumptions with no reliable information to back it up. When you are coaching, you are given an opportunity to be on the shoes of the staff to gain a greater perspective on how you can guide them to solve their challenges.
8. Lack of practical questions: Questions are great tools for them to arrive in the best possible way on how they can do their job better or how they can do tasks effectively. However, if the coach is saying “too much” information and doesn’t engage with the employee by asking questions, then the objective of the coaching session will not be met.
9. Talking about yourself all the time: The coaching session is not for you, but them. You can talk about your experiences but remember that it’s not about you.
10. Lacking patience and responsiveness: If they are talking to you and you keep on checking your phone for notifications, or you started to become impatient because they don’t give you an answer you want to hear, then you’re not at all helping your staff.

Conclusion

Having a coach in the company helps a lot of employees. It’s not easy to be a coach but doing so affects the company primarily as it promotes critical thinking for employees and empowers them to take more ownership when it comes to dealing with their challenges at work.