How'd I Do Coach?

April 11 2022
By: Shawn M. Galloway

For work teams to thrive, coaching is an essential leadership style. How many of your leaders of people are proficient at this? In our Leadership Safety Coaching workshops, we spend a lot of time learning to provide and receive feedback successfully. Accountability is just as much about behaviors as it is about results. Often, we find more conversations are about results. You coach behaviors and performance, not results. The necessary performance to accomplish the results must be known to all for the discussions to be meaningful.

Leaders must identify and monitor information about behaviors to help their people succeed. Imagine if American Football coaches only had the halftime scores (shown at the top of the picture) to discuss the game's status in the locker room? "Texans, whatever you are doing isn't working. Try harder!" "Saints, whatever you are doing is working well. Keep on keeping on!"

The purpose of feedback is to encourage effective future performance. How do you accomplish that with only results data?

However, if you have the performance data (shown below the results), you can now understand why the Houston Texans lost this game to the New Orleans Saints. The only thing it seemed the Texans were good at that game was turning the ball over, which is not a good thing. What behaviors are necessary to accomplish your desired results? If you can't quickly answer this, that is precisely where to begin.

"Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They're just more engaged at work."" — Tom Rath

"The interesting thing about coaching is that you have to trouble the comfortable, and comfort the troubled."" — Ric Charlesworth