If you’re looking for new ways to attract staff and to keep them on board once you hire them, consider adding coaching to your learning strategy.

Coaching has many benefits, some of them more obvious than others. Many of the lesser-known benefits will help your employment brand and create the loyalty you need to retain your people.

In the simplest form, coaching makes us better performers.

Coaching is what you do ‘with’ someone to help them reach their potential.

Coaching involves teaching new skills, supporting team members to practise and implement new skills, giving feedback, and giving encouragement.

A coach isn’t managing their team member; they are helping them be their best.

Coaching helps us put our knowledge into action. It moves us from knowledge acquisition to implementing new ideas, techniques and skills into our work environment.

If you’re not seeing performance results from your current training programmes, then they may be too passive. Just telling me something may change my knowledge about the topic; however, it will not change my behaviour. Learning and performance are two different things, and we need to make sure that we are concentrating on what will change results.

Adults are bad at learning new stuff

We are really good at learning new things when we are children. Our everyday lives are made up of firsts, and we are continually learning how to refine skills through trial and error. We don’t get embarrassed about our failures and keep trying to accomplish new skills.

As adults, we become less willing to try new things. We expect to be instant experts and are embarrassed when we don’t perform well straight away. Once our confidence has had a few knocks, we are reticent about putting ourselves out there. We stick with the status quo and stay safe. Trying something new seems just a bit too hard, and the risk of failure is too high.

That’s why we need a coach!

A  coach can give you the encouragement and feedback that you need to change and progress your skills. Most of us think of coaches in the sporting area. The world’s top athletes have coaches, sometimes more than one. They are there to get the most out of their athlete, to look after their well-being, to ensure that they enjoy what they are doing, to share in the successes and to commiserate when the result is not what you want. Most coaches know that it’s a long game and that top performances don’t come overnight.

Use your managers as coaches

I’m not talking about hiring external coaches (although if you have the time and money, it would be a great investment). I’m talking about upskilling your managers so that they can coach their team. There is no one in a better position than your immediate line manager to support you, encourage you and give you feedback about your performance. The focus and observation mean that the team work hard to perform. And most of us like coming to work and performing well. It makes us feel good and it makes us stay with our employer.

Coaches like developing their skills too. They get the chance to practice and to adapt to different personalities. Their new skills will increase the performance of their team as well as their own performance.

What are the benefits of coaching?

Coaching builds trust by facilitating communication between team members and their managers. Most people work for their manager, not the organisation, so equipping your managers with the right coaching skills allows them to attract and retain great people.

There are good financial reasons to implement coaching in your business too. As the graph below shows, even encouraging your managers to coach can give you a small lift in your performance. Wilson Learning found that when you give your managers some coaching skills training and also train them in the content that their team will be looking at you can get a 41 per cent increase in performance. It makes you wonder why more companies don’t make the effort to implement coaching into their business with such huge gains to be had.

Coaching by RedSeed

Coaching improves performance; however, as L&D professionals, it is very hard to find integrated learning solutions in the market. That’s because the tech is difficult. 

At RedSeed, it’s been part of our DNA since the beginning. 

It’s an expectation that a learner will practise their new skills and an expectation that the manager coach will be accountable for validating competence and consistency. The challenge has always been making coaching happen. There are often good intentions, but coaching takes skill, time and energy and gets pushed down the list of priorities. 

The RedSeed system nudges, reminds, guides and supports coaches to support their team members to practise their new skills.

At RedSeed, we focus on performance outcomes as well as learning outcomes. We’re most interested in changing behaviour and moving the dial, be it revenue, cost, time to competency, or something else that’s important to you.