Firstly.. Why be a coach?

You would not expect your favourite sports team to be effective without a coach… nor would you expect the people you lead to be effective without a leader.

To get high-level productivity from the team your role as a leader takes in a great deal of coaching and mentoring skills. Therefore your aim should be, to be the best coach you can be.

How to be a great coach

Here are some great points on what makes a great coach, take a look a them and decide which of these skills you already have and which ones you may need to work on.

• Love people – Great coaches know they are leading people in a great cause of some kind and that the value of that is very high, to get the most out of the team and therefore the task at hand they know that people will be the device that makes the task happen. If the coach loves people they will then find ways to enhance their teams skills to be all they can be. To do so they have to love people after all it’s all they have to get the job done.
• Motivate them – If you want the best out of people yo need to motivate them in ways that inspire them to do great things, to go the extra mile and see the results of their efforts and be pleased with them. Motivation is NOT driving them, yelling and screaming, pushing them hard, its more about finding ways to encourage them to find those things in themselves if they need to.
• Be a coach – Being a coach might even entail you putting on a coach’s hat, then working with your people. Consider this, what if you had a team meeting and you did just that, put on a hat that said coach. It would probably lighten the mood and let the team know you are coaching them, providing support, motivation, guidance and the skills to encourage them.
• Get their opinions and thoughts – Why should you be the one with all the ideas? Let the team use their collective intelligence to explore more effective ways of doing what they do. You might just get a lot more than you thought.
• Explore mistakes – In learning to walk you stood up and fell down a few times until it all came together, after a while the bruises, scratches and scrapes healed and you explored walking some more, no one said you couldn’t do it did they?

  Mistakes therefore are just opportunities to learn and grow and you need to ensure that in the pursuit of better outcomes that the more mistakes the team makes should therefore mean they are pushing the boundaries further to discover better ways to get results.

• Be a great communicator – Listen a lot and when you speak or write make it elegant and effective. You will also want to be asking great questions so you can get great answers and allow you people to be all they can be.
• Know there are differences and work with them – We are all different. A great coach will be aware of this and find ways to connect effectively with all people despite their differences.
• Empower people – You have a team, how do you want them to do things? To their full potential or less? The answer HAS to be full potential anything else is a cop out. Therefore it is your solemn duty to find out how to empower them, and keep looking for ways to take it further.
• Solve challenges and problems together – As a coach you may ask questions, which are more about how to solve challenges and problems, than telling them how to do things.
• Keep meetings effective – Get to the point and stay on track with the agenda, get very strict about the meeting structure, that way you can sort things out better. Any chace you get, train your team rather than merely meet with them.
• Work on the positive and reward the behaviour you want – Who wants to push a “negative barrow” about? After all it’s hard and like an uphill trudge, the more you push the heavier the barrow gets and the steeper the incline. When it’s positive you might just find the barrow carries you for significant parts of the ride, with the team taking it in turn to push.
• Be an advocate for your people – As much as your team “puts in” to get results, be sure and back them up if the need arises. If they need a reference do it. If they need support in dealing with other issues at work do it. Be there for them, after all they are there for you and the tasks at hand, the pay off will be a team of truly committed people wanting to readily go the extra mile.
• Self edit – As a coach your commitment to being all you can be will mean you are leading by example. Before long you will be seeking out every opportunity to hone your skills in all aspects of being a coach and editing yourself to get better results.

Stumble it!