Performance coaching is often reserved for low performers that often need more attention. Low performers take up the majority of leaders’ performance coaching time. While they do need coaching, guidance, and discipline, leaders often ignore or forget about those employees who consistently meet or exceed expectations. Over the past 35+ years, CMOE has found that leaders and managers often fail to provide performance coaching to above-average, or outstanding, employees. This is a disservice to both high-performers and organizations.
In order to address this need, CMOE has developed a Performance Coaching™ Workshop that will help managers become comfortable with coaching their high performers, low performers, and those employees that fall somewhere in between.
THE FEAR OF PERFORMANCE COACHING
Leaders tend to be hesitant about coaching strong employees. They hesitate to interfere, interrupt their groove, or waste their time. We face the same dilemma in our own organization. Truth be known, even high-performers cause small, infrequent issues. They deserve developmental and performance coaching time to help them avoid making small mistakes in the future. Leaders need to approach these employees differently than the low-performers. By definition, they are knowledgeable, skillful, and self-motivated, and their personality and style likely fits the organization. They tell leaders through the quality of their work that they want to be helpful to the organization and feel genuinely responsible to do their best work. Consequently, when leaders fail to provide these employees with performance coaching and feedback, the employees receive the greatest disservice—not the leader or the organization.
We find that when a concern or issue does develop, it is often the result of factors other than those listed above:
- Perceptual blind spots (the employee made an error and didn’t realize it)
- confusion and misunderstanding (the employee didn’t realize or understand that the assignment was his/her responsibility)
- Inadequate resources (the employee didn’t have sufficient time, money, equipment, or personnel needed to do the job)
These performance problems are easier to deal with when talented, motivated, and compatible employees work on your side. The bad news? As the leader, you must be the performance coach and refuse to allow these employees to blindly plod along thinking everything is fine.
ATTENDING A PERFORMANCE COACHING™ WORKSHOP
Performance Coaching Workshop attendees often don’t know what they can expect to get out of attending this workshops. Because we have been doing this for so long, we have developed an extremely effective training method. Our method includes:
- Facilitation: Our coaching facilitators hold advanced degrees in Organizational Development and related disciplines and have multiple decades of experience as corporate trainers and facilitators.
- Pre-workshop Article: We work with organizations of all kinds. Because organizational needs vary by industry, we assign workshop participants a short article to read before they get to the workshop in order to familiarize them with the topic and get them in the right frame of mind.
- Comprehensive Participant Workbook: Our workshops contain so much information that it is nearly impossible to remember all of it. We provide workshop participants with a participant workbook they can use as a reference and a guide when they need it.
- Hardbound copy of Win-Win Partnerships: Be on the Leading Edge with Synergistic Coaching by Steven J. Stowell, Ph.D. and Matt M. Starcevich, Ph.D.
- Coaching Skills Assessment
- Coaching Skills Model
- Strategy Creation Tools
- Experiential exercise materials
Performance coaching skills are becoming vitally important to organizations as they strive to become more and more competitive in the new economy.
