Benefits of Coaching For Your Employees

One of the signs of good company culture is one that values curiosity and learning. For employees to build their careers within your business, they need to grow beyond the role for which they were hired and flourish within their careers. Yet, as everyone’s needs and goals are different, sending someone on a predetermined set of courses may not always get the best out of them.

Instead, access to coaching can have considerable benefits for your employees and your business. In this blog, we’re going to look at how coaching for employees helps them shine and grow within your business.

When You Might Want to Use Coaching for Employees

There are many learning and development routes available for employees. Not all will be right for the level, skillset and ambition. You may want to open access to education and training or provide a mentor. Yet, for some employees, a coach can be the best option to help them move forward with their careers.

We’re going to share some examples of when coaching for employees can be a benefit to both them and your company.

Build Confidence

You’ll have many different personalities and traits within your organisation. Some, have the skills and drive but lack the confidence to take the next step in their career.

It will be the colleague who you have in mind for a particular promotion but they never apply for the job. Or the person who does the work and has great ideas but tends not to speak up in meetings.

Often a lack of confidence can lead to someone having imposter-syndrome feelings. This can hold them back from taking on a role with more responsibility in case they “get found out”.

Taking the time to notice those who are sitting in their comfort zone can help you offer them support through coaching. Coaching is particularly useful as it can help your team member use practical steps to shift their mindset.

It’s not a productivity or work issue but one that needs encouragement and support. Coaching is a powerful tool in this situation so that you can discover the hidden talent within your organisation.

Encourage Diversity

Research finds that companies with diverse leadership outperform their competitors by between 15-30%. As with confidence, you can often have hidden talent within your teams that are not taking the career opportunities that you present.

Identifying those within the business who have potential and nurturing that through coaching can help your staff to succeed where they might not otherwise.

We innately tune into social cues that we present when we’re in a group. These subconscious cues help us fit in with others so that we feel safe. It could be understanding whether we shake hands or hug, wear a suit or shirt, or whether it’s acceptable or not to go home on the dot at 5pm.

It’s a rule book that we pick up from the behaviour of those around us. Yet, when we’re not from a particular background, we don’t always know the cues and norms of the new group we’re fitting into. Therefore, it can be harder to take a risk such as applying for that new role.

Coaching can help unpick what might be subconsciously holding someone back from making that application. Or volunteering to go on the training course. It can give them the tools they need to thrive in their career and within your business

Engage Talent

Coaching is a great way to engage talent who might otherwise be thinking about leaving. If we turn the first example on its head and you have an overly confident member of staff who simply isn’t ready for more responsibility, coaching can help them gain a level of self-awareness so they can reach that point.

This, in turn, can prevent the employee from disengaging in their work if they are feeling disappointed and frustrated at not being at the level they desire.

Coaching can help them understand both their strengths and weaknesses so that they can work on both and gain the experience they need for the role they want. Developing talent this way will help create a deeper level of loyalty.

Develop Good Leadership

Good leadership is about getting the best out of the team rather than having all of the answers and telling everyone what to do. This is the opposite of how we have come to see ‘the boss’ since the industrial revolution and so changing how you view this role in a business can take time.

Another aspect of good leadership comes back to the issue of social identity. The unspoken rules we have about behaviour come from the behaviour of the team leader.

So a leader who says one thing and does another is not going to get the best out of their team. It will only serve to encourage the wrong kinds of behaviours within the team. Instead, leading by example will set in place the best practices.

We can see this in attitudes to answering work emails outside of work hours. If you’re working late and the boss replies to your email almost instantly then it sends the message that this is the norm. Therefore, when you next get an email after work hours, you’re more likely to respond than wait until the next morning.

It may be that’s not one of the behaviours you want on your team but instead to encourage proper rests and breaks. For everyone to do this, you need the leadership team to be setting the example.

Increase Communication

Overall, the more that your talent can recognise what support they need, the more they can communicate this to others. It might start with realising they need a mindset shift and then roll into communicating better briefs or taking a stronger lead during meetings.

This all leads to productive teams who work well together and are less likely to feel stressed, ill or looking for other roles.