Teams need coaches

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your commitment to getting the best out of yourself and your work colleagues or team? The higher your score, the more reason you have to coach your people.

Coaching is a way of helping individuals, teams and companies improve their performance by getting them to identify and act on the things holding them back. It's also about helping people broaden their view of a situation, giving them more choice in how they respond.

For example, staff in a particularly adversarial organisation will typically write aggressive contractual letters, believing that the first line of defence is attack. Coaching would help them clarify what they really want to achieve, identify options and then choose the best.

A coaching management style involves more communication and support and less command and control. The idea is to help people solve their own problems rather than solve the problems for them.

With our industry and indeed the world changing, we need more intelligent ways of getting the best out of resources - and people are our most precious and under-utilised resource. I often felt my company was only getting about 30% of my potential even though I was working long, hard hours and doing my best. I had so much more to offer but didn't have the time as my job included all kinds of hassles and interference. What if I am representative? The construction industry employs two million people!

We now have a more intelligent workforce. When I graduated in the early 1980s, I was told that only 5% of the population had a degree; 20 years on many more people graduate and the government is on track to raise that to 50% by 2010. Graduates are less inclined to put up with being pushed around and told what to do - they simply leave and find another job or career. Ask yourself what your company's staff turnover is. Could it benefit from coaching?

Given the chance, many people will find the easiest and most effective way of getting their job done. The coach manager spends far less time telling people what to do, motivating them to do it and checking on their progress, timekeeping, quality of work and so on. How much of your time (and stress) is spent checking for compliance?

Coaching can be used any time and all the time - for problem solving, organising and chairing or participating in meetings, improving team performance or helping staff on site increase their productivity, safety and quality of work. Ask a bricklayer what's holding them back and how they can overcome it, listen to what they say and then help them bring about the necessary change.

I often felt my company was only getting about 30% of my potential even though I was working long, hard hours

Anyone who is committed to their personal growth and the success of other people can use coaching effectively. You need to ask open questions about facts (what, when, where, who, rather than questions that give a yes/no answer), listen to the response and then feed it back to the person being coached to gain clarity.

Then ask more probing questions (how much, how often, how many, what else, what if) to open up options. Ask the person or the group to weigh up the options and decide on their way forward. Follow their interest and use their words - try to avoid asking "why" as it provokes a defensive response.

The basic process is to ask questions and actively listen.

There are plenty of books on the subject. Before I list a couple, here's a flavour of the genre from The Inner Game of Tennis:

"It takes years to change behaviour if that's what you're trying to do. But behaviour comes out of how a player sees things. If he sees a tennis ball as a threat, he swings as if he's defending himself and does 33 wrong things. Help him see the tennis ball as a tennis ball, not a threat. He'll stop those 33 wrong things. In this way, you can make radical changes in performance with only a few sentences on perception. See what he sees before you start coaching."

Coaching for Performance by John Whitmore, ISBN 185788 1702

The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey, ISBN 033029 5136.