Leaders have an essential role in engaging employees and leading them to high performance. With service and knowledge intensive work leadership and coaching employees personally have taken the place of traditional management. In today’s business world leaders have to be able to make the employees willing to give their best for the organization. Performance in knowledge intensive work depends on motivation and individual mental processes.

 

But how to learn to be an engaging coaching leader? Training, personal coaching and group coaching help managers willing to learn develop their communication skills and emotional intelligence. Managers can learn to be better at engaging people for high performance. Most important is to understand the basis of good leadership and how leading by coaching affects employees’ performance.

 

Leaders acting as coaches engage and inspire employees. Leaders need to set inspiring targets with their people. A shared inspiring goal stirs up the team spirit and increases the desire to reach the set target. Goals too easy are as uninspiring as goals too far away. Goals need to give enough challenge. Everyone should have one stretching target for themselves so that employees have the possibility to use their talents and grow professionally. A coach observes individual performance and helps the employee develop performance actively. Engaging leaders will work with the employee to figure out why the performance is not on target level and how it could be improved.

 

Leadership advice is easy to give but not so easy to use. There are some basic things in leadership that will help you to become better at engaging your people. Guide positively. Give lots of feedback. Give both reinforcing and corrective feedback that shows your employee´s work and its results have lots of meaning to you. Reinforcing feedback helps to see what kind of results are wanted and corrective feedback gives employees a good reason to improve their performance. Concentrate first on positive feedback and encouragement. We tend to tell more often when something is wrong but forget to mention it when things are great. People learn also from reinforcing feedback. It tells which actions and results are the good ones and should thus be continued. In addition it strengthens one´s beliefs in own abilities and increases willingness to get more good results.

 

Feedback raises specific points of performance but evaluating performance overall is an important part of development work. Leaders should work together with employees when evaluating performance. A joint evaluation process usually teaches more than just management feedback with hard facts. The quality and effect of evaluation is better when both leaders and employees view has been taken in to account and processed together.

 

When things needing improvement have been pointed out, engaging leaders recognize the contribution when performance improves. Old style managers can get work done by pushing and by intimidating people but engagement, best performance and creativity will disappear with this style. A more effective way to lead people is to find out what motivates them to do their job really well.

 

If leaders can engage their people, people will contribute more, individual performance will be better, and the performance of the whole organization rises to a much higher level. In practice leading by coaching can best be done with the help of a coaching map and coaching plans. Better results usually don’t come by accident. Coaching needs plans, goals and actions.

 

Our next blog post will concentrate on Strategy Execution and the basic execution principles and ideas presented in the new book “Strategia toimeksi” to be published on 5^th February 2010 by the H2OTeam. There will be more to read about inspiring leaders in the newsletters coming after that.