5 Tips to Be More than the Boss: Become a Great Coach

In finance, you want to be more than the numbers person, good boss and reliable colleague.

It pays off to also be a great coach to your employees.

Here’s why you want to care about coaching: “Coaching boosts productivity and innovation and improves the odds of success in a transformation. When you sum the benefits, you get a clearer idea of the ROI, which, based on our research and analysis, can be anywhere from five to 20 times, depending on the use case,” says Matti Niebelschütz, Co-founder and CEO of CoachHub, based on his research in McKinsey Digital.

Qualities of a Great Coach

Think back to your own experiences coming up through the finance ranks. What bosses did you admire most and what qualities stood out? How did they make a positive impact on you and your career?

We all have different criteria for what makes our best bosses great. But there are some consistencies most people can agree on. The boss:

• helped them play to their strengths
• work on their weaknesses
• celebrated their successes
• guided them through failure
• listened to them
• developed them
• empowered them, and
• trusted them.

In other words, they were more like a coach, and less like a boss.

Unlock Employee Potential with Coaching

The right coaching, at the right time, can pay huge dividends for finance leaders who want to build engagement and productivity.

So how can finance pros coach employees to inspire better performance? Here are five practical tips for successful coaching conversations:

1. Prioritize Effective 1:1 Meetings

The purpose of conducting 1:1 meetings is to coach employees to achieve the best performance possible. But how should these meetings be structured to make them most productive?

Schedule a standing weekly or bi-weekly 1:1 meeting with each employee to cover the topics that need to be discussed. It could be an hour, 30 minutes or even less. The key is for both the manager and employee to be fully present and engaged in the discussion. It’s also helpful to schedule 1:1 meetings early in the morning so there’s less chance a work emergency will hijack your meeting.

And you want to avoid canceling 1:1 meetings. That sends the message to the employee that they aren’t a priority for you. Even a short 15-minute call while you’re at the airport or grabbing lunch is better than letting another week or two go by without checking in.

And while the beauty of these meetings is that they are more informal in nature than the annual review, each meeting should still have an established agenda and flow. Plan to discuss key wins, goal progress and important tasks for what’s ahead.

2. Ask the Right Questions

Effective coaches spend more time listening and less time directing. The employee should be doing the majority of the talking during a coaching conversation. But you also have an important role to play in guiding these conversations: Ask the right questions and dig deeper.

Two effective questions you can ask to kick off any performance discussion are:

• What have you done exceptionally well since our last meeting?
• What, if anything, would you have done differently?

By asking these questions, you’re coaching employees toward greater self-awareness and self-management.

Asking open-ended questions that guide employees to arrive at answers on their own is a hallmark of great coaching – and a powerful way to create a manager-employee relationship built on trust. You can provide guidance once the employee opens up, but this initial step encourages employee growth, development and autonomy.

3. Make Feedback a 2-Way Street

When was the last time you asked employees for candid feedback on your performance as a manager? It can be awkward: No one wants to give their boss uncomfortable feedback!

But you want to regularly ask employees how you can better support them by finding out what you should keep doing, stop doing, and start doing. Assure them there will be no retribution for negative feedback.

By actively soliciting feedback from employees, you open the door to more honest discussions. It also makes you a better boss in the process. It’s also a great way to model how to positively receive, respond to, and appropriately act on constructive feedback.

4. Make Coaching a Habit

Far too often, managers (and employees) save performance conversations for the annual performance review. But the once-a-year appraisal is really more about evaluating employees than developing them.

Trying to remember each employee’s “bests” and “worsts” over the past year, especially if you have multiple direct reports, is bound to yield a less-than-complete picture of performance.

The key to high performance is ongoing, real-time feedback. It reinforces positive behaviors and corrects the not-so-positive ones.

While 1:1 meetings are a great time to have these regular performance conversations, they’re also not the only time you should be providing coaching and feedback. Feedback is a dish best served hot – as soon after the action or behavior as possible.

5. Deliver Simple, Direct, Actionable Feedback

Building trust is critical to being an effective coach. Employees see right through the “sandwich approach” to giving feedback — when you try to bury the true negative feedback between two pieces of generic positive feedback.

Instead, remember that delivering feedback that is simple, direct and actionable helps employees clearly understand and focus on the area to improve. When you jumble the message with too much information, it confuses and misleads employees. What’s more, it can even cause employees to forget the real, positive feedback you give them.

Honest feedback delivered with the intent to help someone grow is a valuable gift, so be direct and leave the sandwich behind – it’s not a very tasty way of delivering feedback.

Managers have the greatest influence on their direct reports’ satisfaction and engagement than anyone or anything else in the organization. In fact, Gallup research reveals that managers account for a staggering 70% of the variance in employee engagement.

A coaching employees approach – when done well – is the key to engaging employees, and engaged employees consistently outperform those who aren’t.