Coaching/mentoring has historically been the least used but is the most effective training modality. This is important to keep in mind, as 40 percent of employees with poor training leave their jobs within the first year.
It’s necessary to note that bringing in a coach does not necessarily signal an issue.
“People tend to connote coaching with there being an immediate problem to solve, but that’s not always the case,” Tao said. “Coaching should be more synonymous with self-improvement, increasing self awareness, learning to make decisions, and building the muscles necessary to do these things repeatedly.”
Williams chimed in to say coaching for leaders of a company should be baked into plans from the beginning. “It shouldn’t be optional, and almost anything is better than nothing,” he said.
Coaching a select number of executives is one thing, but implementing practices that apply to a growing company is another. In-person meetings are the most effective way to coach someone, but time and budget constraints often make it difficult to scale coachability within an organization.
In this case, peer-to-peer mentoring can be a great practice, but people need to be trained to appropriately do so. It’s important to be clear when a friendly conversation is happening vs. a coaching conversation.
Dunn noted: “You tend to teach the way you’re taught, so it’s hard to coach if you’ve never been coached. Once you gain exposure to effective mentoring in your company, you can implement similar practices.”
To begin implementing coaching at scale, Therianos recommends testing the appetite for coaching within your organization, understanding what people want to focus on, and setting clear baselines to measure against to know if practices are effective.
See more from Illuminate here.