7 Tips for Coaching Your Team to Success

Coaching your team to success requires a mindset shift for everyone. But in these times of significant, rapid, unprecedented change, coaching may just be the key to helping your team cope and continuing to grow their skills.

Whether you use internal coaches, external coaches, or coach employees yourself, coaching your team to success will unlock everything from team performance to future leaders.

So here are our tips on how you can utilise coaching to unlock team success.

Coach your leaders

Leadership coaching doesn’t just benefit your leaders. It has a ripple effect across your organisation, leading to high-performance teams, more effective leaders, and a strong coaching culture.

Your leaders are the example that everyone follows. So if they show that they’re open to learning new leadership skills, developing their leadership style, and growing their individual strengths, your team members are more likely to be open to keep learning, too.

So then you won’t just see the benefits of coaching in your leadership team, you’ll notice the ripple effect it has on your employee performance, too.

Create a coaching culture

When your leaders set an example, it begins to create a coaching culture within your business. This attitude towards self-development and self-awareness is contagious. It’ll make more employees want to see what all the fuss is about and look into improving their skills too. (This is where our on-demand coaching sessions can come in handy – they can get a taster without the commitment of a coaching programme.)

From better communication to more effective feedback, coaching sessions help employees become better team players and contributes to the growth of a high-performance team.

Team coaching or group coaching options can also help foster a sense of team camaraderie, improving team dynamics so that they work better together and are more productive in their roles.

Encourage employees to use coaching

Coaching employees only works if they know you have a coaching programme. It’s therefore important that you tell employees about the programme and why they should use it. Offering low-commitment coaching options that are open to more employees can also help embed a coaching culture into your business and get more employees to give it a go.

Using our on-demand coaching model, your company gets access to a select amount of Sanctus Coaching sessions per month. You can choose who has access to this, or open it up to everyone.

This design means no one is forced into coaching if they’re not ready for it, or feel they don’t need or want it. Instead, you get people who are committed and invested signing up for coaching, meaning you also get better results.

Whether they only want a one-off session to solve a particular problem, a series of sessions to talk through something, or to become part of a structured programme, we have an employee coaching model to suit your business needs.

Share the benefits

Some people may feel sceptical of coaching in general, or a particular coaching process. That’s why it’s important that as many people as possible share the benefits they’ve experienced thanks to effective coaching.

Whether it’s supporting their leadership development, making them more confident in their role, or helping them deal with a difficult colleague, successful coaching meets employees where they’re at and guides them to where they want and need to be.

Reward your high performers

FitFlop uses coaching initiatives as one way to reward its high performers. Those high performers have gone on to develop their leadership styles and take on more senior roles within the business. All from working with Sanctus coaches!

Investing in someone’s learning and development through a coaching initiative is a powerful way to show that you believe in them and want them to stay. It shows trust, faith, and acts as a thank you for the hard work they’ve put in so far.

This investment is also vital to attracting and retaining Gen Z talent – 40% said that they want companies to invest in one-to-one coaching initiatives to help with their career growth.

A little gratitude can go a long way to retaining your employees, especially the high performers who may be able to easily find opportunities elsewhere.

Come up with specific goals

Specific, measurable goals ensure that everyone gets the most from a coaching relationship. You, your employees, and your coaches can see exactly where employees started, where they want to go, and the direction they’re heading in.

Of course, you want to follow the classic SMART goals template so that everyone can track employee progress towards the goal:

• Specific: What do you want to achieve?
• Measurable: How will you know if it’s achievable?
• Attainable: Can you achieve it?
• Relevant: Is it relevant to your current direction?
• Time-based: What’s the deadline?

Coaches can help employees come up with a SMART goal that ties into wider company objectives, even if they’re unsure how their own role or priorities align. Getting everyone working towards the same common goal ensures everyone within your business is rowing in the same direction so you’ll get to the finish line faster.

Use an external coach

While internal coaches are great, external coaches come with their own set of benefits. For example, they have an objective view of a situation.

Employees can often feel concerned that internal coaches only care about the business, rather than them.

External coaches don’t come with this baggage; employees know that the coach has no stake in the business, so they can discuss concerns without fearing reprisals like they would talking to someone in-house.

Conclusion

The key to coaching your team to success is to embed coaching, and other forms of learning, into your company culture. The stronger your internal learning culture, the more employees will both want to develop their skills and feel supported in doing so.

As a result, you’ll experience higher retention rates, more engaged employees, stronger team dynamics, and improved employee performance. Employees will also feel happier in their roles, making them more effective leaders and team members.

Want to find out more about coaching your team to success? Drop us a message to find out how our on-demand and flexible coaching models could support your business.