A critical part of leadership is coaching excellence from the team. You help the team learn the vocabulary and meanings needed to have a superior culture. Coaching excellence is NOT about bossing and demanding. Instead, you dedicate your efforts to pursue their best. You share negative and positive performance issues (see course 05 – “Seek and Share Truth”). Coaching excellences also uses the free and powerful recognition and praise tools. Even better, it uses the most underrated skill – Listening – and the most powerful skill – Questions.
Coaching Focuses on Their Best
GR8 Leaders value and develop people. It is not about demanding the best, instead you invite and facilitate it. GR8 Leaders coach so they can develop more leaders and that takes time. Coaching excellence requires using THP to provide clear goals and behavior changes for each person. It also requires just getting to know a person. If you don’t get to know them, it will be harder to understand their what motivates them.
Coaching Uses Recognition and Praise
Leaders don’t use enough recognize and praise with their people. Recognition and praise is simple, free, and very effective! It even helps improve the productivity of the team. Here is a simple guideline when you praise someone – make it True, Specific, and Personal. Research shows a big difference when leaders recognize, praise, and respect the people they work with. It is not a small difference, it is huge.
Coaching Requires Listening
You need to listen more than speak. Listening is one of the two most important skills of a GR8 Leader. It is not considered important by poor leaders. If you want to listen better, you need to combine humility with focus and curiosity. And, it works best when you picture what people are saying to you. Picturing is the biggest difference in how much you understand and remember what you heard.
Coaching Requires Questions
In fact, a good ratio is 4 questions to every statement. Questions are the most powerful skill for GR8 Leaders. Peter Drucker said, “The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.” Because of the importance of both listening and questions, they are practiced throughout the program.