What is Professional Coaching and Development

Coaching and Development is designed to improve employee engagement, boost confidence, increase retention, strengthen relationships, and, most of all, help you invest in your employees so they can reach their highest potential. Business goals typically prioritize saving costs and increasing margins, but developing employees also contributes to your bottom line. By investing in employee development and providing them with an environment where they can be successful, you also create an environment that means success for the company. Ultimately, leaders should not express themselves just as managers, or bosses, but instead as coaches and mentors. This kind of mindset will bring success to both the company and individual career development.

So what exactly is it? It consists of two key aspects:

1. Professional Coaching: a form of development in which a mentor supports a learner in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance. Ultimately, it is a mindset that allows you to build relationships, listen to your employees, and encourage them to be the best they can be.
2. Professional Development: providing opportunities for a person to improve upon their skills and capabilities. The goal is to build employee morale by investing in their professional well-being, career goals, and true motivations so that they can reach their full potential.

Together, these act as a powerhouse creating a more sustainable, exciting culture employees are eager to be a part of. Effective leaders take the necessary steps to integrate this mindset into their leadership style, and, in doing so, affect almost every part of the company in a positive way.

Essential Skills, Techniques, and Best Practices

Self-awareness and introspection is the key to understanding those around you and how you can help put them in the best possible position to succeed. As a coach, you must understand your own strengths and weaknesses; you need to know how to identify your motivations, work style, level of mental toughness, etc., before you can analyze and develop others. Going through this process will allow you to be a very useful resource to other leaders in your company, as well as your employees.

An effective coach has these essential skills to help nurture their leader-employee relationship through their obstacles as well as their successes:

• Listen with curiosity
• Be accurate in your reflection by showing you understand their needs
• Be supportive
• Provide constructive, honest feedback
• Communicate clearly

Once you have carefully developed and honed the skills necessary to be a great coach, you need to have a strategic approach as to how you will implement them into your coaching practice. Best practices for coaching employees include:

• Establishing expectations
• Creating a plan
• Measuring the impact
• Continuously building the relationship
• Consistently checking in on action items
• Challenging them, but also helping find solutions
• Coaching and leading, not “managing”

Before you begin the coaching process, you need to assess the current situation, define your goal, and create a strategic plan of action to support the desired changes. The purpose of this is to facilitate structured, behavioral changes over time towards a common goal. With a focus on development, your employees will have the opportunity to engage in honest conversations in which they will determine their current approach, receive constructive feedback, practice new skills, reflect on results, and make adjustments.

Effective Coaching Methods in the World of Sales

Sales is a unique and challenging field, but there are key personality traits you can develop in your team to greatly impact their rate of success. For the past two decades, Caliper has been researching mental toughness – the personality traits that set top-level athletes apart from the rest. Our research discovered that the same traits found in elite-level athletes were also found in successful sales professionals

Our research team defines the psychological advantage of six essential personality traits that make up mental toughness and how you can further develop them within your team:

Level-headedness

• Level-headedness is all about controlling your emotions even in high-stress situations. This is essential to the success of any organization, but how do you know if your team members have it? When the going gets tough, they will come out on the other side composed, strong, and continuing to work toward solving the issues at hand.
• Not everyone will have total control over their emotions, but it can be developed through effective coaching. By showing them how remaining calm in stressful situations can benefit their career growth, they will start working towards creating good habits and techniques that allow them to stabilize their emotions

Stress-tolerance

• All employees experience stress at some point in their career; it is inevitable as things get busy. But, those who can push through it, focus on the task at hand, and stay positive, will find the most success.
• These three things will help your team maintain a higher level of tolerance when it comes to stress: 1) look at the positives, 2) coach by example, and 3) look at the opportunities. By coaching your employees, you will help them manage their stress levels, and, through practice, they will build the endurance needed to deal with negative pressures.

Resiliency/Ego-strength

• Emotional resilience makes you more adaptable in places of change and able to bounce back from setbacks. It will help you manage your workload more effectively and help create better relationships.
• To improve resiliency, employees need to feel secure in their role. A great way to do that is through skills training and by giving them a platform to share their ideas. By offering them a way to improve their communication tactics, technical skills, or soft skills, they will feel more confident and supported by the company.

Energy/Persistence

• Energy/persistence is a measure of one’s potential to sustain a high level of activity over extended periods. High scores relate to being active and persistent in overcoming obstacles. Those with lower scores tend to be less energetic with respect to tasks and may not always persist when necessary to achieve a goal.
• Persistence fuels employees to meet goals even when stress is high or motivation is low. It is the key to accomplishing tasks to the best of their abilities regardless of negative situational factors. Though, not all employees exhibit persistence when timelines get tight. The best way to help employees stay persistent is by setting clear goals and measuring milestones.

Self-structure

• Self-structure means a measure of one’s preference for independently determining work methods. A high score indicates the motivation to work independently. A low score indicates one is unlikely to define one’s own work habits and methods.
• Many employees lack self-structure and struggle with time management and organizational skills. They could be failing to set goals for themselves or making strategic decisions, but with some project management coaching, they will become self-starters and ready for anything. Teach them how to create priority task lists, manage deadlines, and how to apply valuable organizational skills to their workload.

Thoroughness

• To be thorough means being detail and process-oriented from start to finish without cutting corners or sacrificing quality for the sake of time. The best way to help employees develop this trait is by coaching prioritization and communicating the importance of each task. Another key factor in thoroughness is consistency and reliability, so demonstrate that it is important to make these things a part of their routine so that thoroughness becomes a standard byproduct of their process.
• Prioritize major tasks and coach them on how to rank the importance of each part as it relates to the whole. This will help your employees understand which tasks need particular care and how the quality of each piece can affect the greater project.

Develop Talent to Their Full Potential with Caliper

Coaching and development are vital to the success of your company, as it will help your employees feel more engaged and passionate about the work they are doing. The process is continuous, so time will need to be invested on a consistent basis, but the return on investment is well worth it. With the Caliper Precision Series, Individual Developmental Guide, and Essentials for Coaching report, we can make the process as simple and seamless as possible. Want to take a look at how these products can help your company? Contact us and we can get you on the right path to developing more successful employees.