Coaching People and Maximizing Your Influence

by Philip Nucleus Sia I

When you hear the word coaching, what probably comes to mind is the idea of telling people what they need to do, like in a basketball team’s huddle. So when you take on a role in the corporate world that requires leading people, you’d probably see it normal that bosses would do the same. While it is true that you sometimes need to give instructions to people, there is more to it than just that. Let us learn and see what other things comprise the recipe for good coaching so we can be more influential in leading people.

Coaching involves building a relationship. As a pre-requisite to coaching, it is important that you know who you will coach. Knowing their personality will help you choose the right words and the motivational points that will influence the person. While you do not need to know every minute detail about the person to achieve this, you have to learn about the reasons that your employee is working with you. Every person has a dream or a goal, albeit some are not aware how they can achieve them. As a leader, you have the power to help the person realize those goals by guiding them. Let them see how their actions now can help them get to those goals. When doing your coaching, you can connect their personal goals to the tasks they need to do. This provides them with the inspiration to work on tasks with less supervision. In a country like the Philippines, where we value the concept of “pakisama” (getting along with others) very much, being a leader requires that you know who you are working with in order to be effective. So go talk to your direct reports about personal matters, say hi to them every day. Thank them for coming to work. Ask them about how their family members are doing. It isn’t prying into their privacy. It is learning more about them so you would know how to help them.

Coaching requires listening. While it can be tempting to be the one talking during your coaching session, it woulld be great to show your employees that you can listen. You have probably experienced at a certain point working with a manager who only gives orders. How does it make you feel? Does his actions positively influence how you work? Does it inspire you? Needless to say, very few people would like someone who does not listen. When you listen, not only do you encourage the person to see you positively, it also allows you to filter between excuses and real reasons. Ask questions to solicit a conversation. Let the person tell you what happened based on their perspective. This will allow the person to think through and reflect on their own mistakes. Not all questions are good however so you have to be cautious about what you ask. Questions that assume that the employee is at fault may result to further damage such as, “Why didn’t you do anything about it?” Questions that start with “Why” generally encourage a defensive behaviour so stay away from questions like those — use What, Where, When, and How. Questions such as, “What happened?” “Where do you think you can make a difference?” or “How could you have helped the situation?” are very powerful questions that allow your employees to reflect. Encouraging this kind of reflective thinking helps people get out of their learned helplessness, which may minimize your supervising work later on. It is important to ask questions that are blame-free and neutral.

Coaching must have a call for action. After each of the coaching sessions, it is important that we ask the person what they will do if they are faced with a similar situation. This allows you to check what learning they got from your coaching. This also provides them with accountability and ownership for their promised solution. If the action solely came from the leader, employees may be impartial about the required action thereby resulting to a lower level of commitment. This commitment increases when the leader knows how to solicit an action item coming from the employee themselves. Sometimes, when employees could not come up with solutions, it is important for a leader to guide the employees through a series questions. Your ability to do this will help improve your scope of influence among your direct reports.

If you would like to learn more about how you can be a more effective coach to your direct reports, or if you would like to learn the art of asking questions that will guide your employees, you may attend our workshop on coaching. We also offer in-house workshops. Please contact us through (02) 433 3342 or (+63) 998 562 49 85.

Staff Training: A Worthwhile Investment for your Human Resource

Any business regardless of industry needs some form of training for their employees. You may require your new staff members to undertake some training which can be job specific or of general importance. This equips them with the rudimentary pieces of information they need to perform their job at an acceptable level. But as they stay longer in the company, they still need to have more training than just that.

Some companies see continuous training as a cost-generating process or function that has a small added value. To some it may be seen as a mere requirement for ISO audits. For others, it is just a day where employees get to skip regular work. For these reason, some companies get service from training providers possible without regard to the quality and appropriateness of the training they are getting. Sometimes, they put training at the bottom of the priority list. But there are a lot of reasons why HR professionals should consider training as a valuable investment for their business.

First, high-quality training provides individuals a sense of development. This means that other than improving the skills they need for their job, they feel that the company is showing a genuine commitment to progress their careers. Developing some expertise and learning new techniques motivate people to do better in their work. It also builds excitement and a sense of change, which battle rust-out. Rust out is when employees develop distaste for their work as a result of doing tasks again and again in the same manner over long periods of time. Having the feeling of development and change among your employees ensure that they have a steady flow of motivation and empowerment to perform their jobs well.

The second benefit of quality training is that it allows you to retain your employees. A recent survey showed that up to 40 percent of employees who receive poor to no training at all tend to leave and seek better opportunities within the first year. In the Philippines, the BPO community puts a lot of efforts in ensuring efficient training processes as they have seen a similar trend. Employees leave as early as within the first 6 months because the training has not been sufficient to the requirements of their job. A good training experience provides employees with the confidence to see that they can perform the expectations of their tasks over a long period of time.

Another benefit of high-quality training is an increase in yield and revenue. If you have productive individuals and you are retaining your employees, you can ascertain a higher and consistent productivity which translates to a better earning for your company. With more workers retained, the need for over-time work is less and production becomes more efficient. With less need for replacements, you can also avoid the high costs of hiring and replacing employees.

With these, we can see that despite the initial costs, training pays back your investment indeed. Every company is in need of training and there is always something that you can help your employees learn so that they can be motivated. Whether it be job specific training such as Customer Service, Communication Skills Training, Engineering Specific Courses, or a more general training like Leadership, Work-Attitude and Values Enhancement, Personal Financial Management, etc., there will always be a pool of rich learning opportunities that you can give to your employees so that they can be a better individuals employed in your company.

To learn more about how you can provide high-quality, tailor-fitted training to your staff that is truly worth your investment; please visit us at www.competad.com. We provide a range of training from soft skills to electrical engineering. You may also contact us at (02) 433 3342. You may also like us at facebook: www.facebook.com/competad.

To download a copy of our 2017 calendar, you may click here: competad-training-calendar-for-2017

Managing Time and Avoiding Stress

Time Management is one of the basic skills that you need to acquire as you go through your daily work. Some tasks are routine. These may be easily handled, however we are not in a perfect world, so when mixed with some time-stealers and unplanned tasks or activities, time management can be quite daunting to accomplish. We only have a fixed 24-hour day that sometimes we feel it isn’t enough to do all the things we need to do. However you decide to spend it is up to you, but it is always a healthy idea to spend some amount of work-life balance so that you can avoid excessive and prolonged stress that may lead to depression and a wide range of other long-term physiological effects.

Managing your time starts with understanding a few important concepts: Biorhythm, Procrastination, Activity Planning, Workspace, and Delegation. Let us take a look at these important concepts and see how these affect our time management.

Biorhythm is also known as circadian rhythms. It came from the Greek term bios, which means life, and rhuthmos, which means regular recurring motion. This tells us that our body, being the creatures-of-habit that we are, functions with regularity. Some of us are more energetic at night while some are more active during the earlier part of the day. To maximize our time, it would be good to identify which parts of the day we are most active and energetic so we can put the more complex and meaningful tasks on those parts of the day.

Procrastination is another concept we need to understand in managing time. Procrastination is setting aside an activity that you can do now and deciding to do it at a later time. As a worker, we need to understand what procrastination level we are at. Like most things, awareness is the start of change. Identify if you are a procrastinator and decide to make a change.

Our workspace is one thing that we usually take for granted, but it is a very important factor in managing time. A cluttered work station is almost always a time stealer as it usually takes time finding what something amidst the mess. Aside from that, it also creates a barrage of silent attention stealers shouting “Deal with me!” for you. An organized workstation can help your mind become at ease. Our minds usually respond well to an orderly environment. It allows us to keep our focus on the important things.

One way to effectively manage your activities within a fixed amount of available time is activity planning. You can plan your activities for the day so you can allocate ample time to accomplish them. Activity planning also helps you break down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable ones. This allows you to eliminate unnecessary stress. The next time you encounter an overwhelming task or a big project that seems too arduous, try activity planning. It definitely helps!

Lastly, when you have the opportunity, delegation is also an effective way of managing time. There are tasks you can delegate both at work and at home. Delegation can also be quite tricky to do. You need to consider the right person for the task. Sometimes, it can be confusing what you can delegate or not. As a key guide, you can always ask a few questions: 1. Is the task not too complex and someone has the right skill level to handle it? 2. Does the task not require extreme confidentiality? 3. Does the task keep me from high priority activities? – If you answered yes to all three questions, then you can delegate the task.

Understanding these five concepts is only the start of how you can manage time. You can still find out more ways on how you can manage your time. There isn’t a cookie-cutter approach for all challenges in managing time. One situation can differ from another. If you would like to learn more about managing time, you can also contact us or check our training calendar by clicking this link.