Welcome to Rocky Mountain Executive Coaching's Blog for executives, leaders, professionals, business owners and just about anyone that works in both the corporate and small business world. The goal of this blog is to clarify and inform, entertain and inspire and to provide insight where there may be questions. Navigating the professional and corporate worlds today can be challenging and there is a lot of 'noise' interfering and creating great barriers to our success. And if you are a small business out there trying to get on (or stay on) your feet - it can be mind boggling.
This blog will be created and executed in 'series' format, with several posts allocated to certain topics. The first series focuses on terms associated with the most foundational need of our business - Communication. The initial posts will address common terms associated with training - how we confuse them, what we should do before we contract someone to support those services and how managers and supervisors are expected to provide training or coaching...without being provided the skills or tools to do it!
You will find the posts thought provoking, informative and supported by research and other authors/experts. I will share my experience working in both public and private enterprises in leadership roles, as well as my experiences as a small business owner and coach. My hope is that what you find in this blog will require you to pause and evaluate your current position - or - inspire you to perhaps take an action. Either way, it will always make you think!
Again - the initial series, which will begin with the next post, will define and provide insight on training, coaching and mentoring. We hire or promote our managers and expect that they are ready and prepared to develop their direct reports - but rarely do we provide any framework, organization or insight on how to get that done. Join me in defining and differentiating those development tools and look for strategies and best practices to help you execute them.
Discussion Question: Each post will be followed by a discussion question. Please feel free to candidly respond to or question what is printed in this blog at any time. Spirited discussion inspires...
Today's Question:
What are your training, coaching and mentoring challenges?... Time, strategies, measurement?
Post Comments:
Since I have been a beneficiary of your coaching and wise counsel, I am a completely biased commentator here... there's my full disclosure. I look forward to following your series of posts and learning from them. Regarding you question: my biggest challenge is time - coaching and mentoring is time consuming, and it's very easy to push aside meetings or not provide the thorough feedback required to help a team member grow. Sometimes we think it's faster/easier to take charge ourselves... and then we do ourselves and our teams a disservice. Second to time, I sometimes struggle with matching my approach to that of my team member. The ability to provide constructive feedback in a way that they can "hear" me and take the feedback... my natural approach is not a fit for everyone, and tempering "me" with enough understanding of "them" takes patience.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments nho - and your full disclosure. I will address both of your challenges in 'near future' posts, but I will touch on them briefly here as well. Time is a real issue - and although we know that time invested in effective training or mentoring will save us both time and grief down the road, it still requires us to invest our time to plan, organize and execute on what is needed. What if I were to tell you that if you plan correctly - you can take charge yourself and get it done - while simultaneously training your employee or team on the task?...and all with a minimum of planning - sound intriguing? I will plan on sharing that strategy soon as I am confident you are not the only one that needs it. As for how to provide constructive feedback in a way that your team can 'hear' you is in itself insightful. I will be talking about that in a future post on the art of 'having the conversation'. As a manager, one of the main reasons you provide 'feedback' to your employees is to 'change behavior'. Either he/she is doing something that you want them to cease, not doing something that you want them to do, or something in that spectrum. This is where it is good to know if your employee needs training, coaching or leadership as that will drive both your approach and what you say. I look forward to getting your feedback on these posts as they begin taking shape. Thanks nho for stopping by to post - talk to you again soon!
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