Coaching, Mentoring and Managing: A Coach Guidebook

The Coaching Role: Inspiring and Motivating

3

One of the biggest challenges faced by managers is to get
employees to do what they are supposed to do. Coaches have the
additional challenge of getting employees to do more than what
they are supposed to do. While working as a management
consultant, Ferdinand Fournies collected information from more
than 20,000 managers and discovered that there are 16 specific
reasons why employees do not do what they’re supposed to do.
The top three reasons follow:

1. They don’t know what they are supposed to do.


2. They don’t know why they are supposed to do it.


3. They don’t know how to do it.
   Each of these causes of nonperformance can be addressed
   immediately with the StaffCoach™ Model. The coach tells them
   the “what” — setting expectations and showing them how to know
   when they achieve them. The mentor handles the why and the
   counselor deals with the how.

How do you start any coaching session to establish
the “what”?

Clarify Your Expectations as Coach: How to Say What You
Think You Said.

• Communicate in terms team members can understand.
  Have you ever been in a meeting and listened to a well-
  meaning, intelligent professional talk gibberish? Everyone
  has. “Gibberish” is trade talk or industry jargon — words
  and expressions that mean something to some specialized
  group somewhere but are meaningless to the general
  public. Hearing gibberish is a maddening experience,
  particularly when you really want to know and act on the
  information being communicated (or rather, not being
  communicated).
  You have three choices in those instances.
  
  
  1. Smile and nod and hope no one asks you to repeat
     what you’ve heard.
  
  
  2. Risk looking dumb by asking, “What does that
     word mean?”
  
  
  
  

Hearing gibberish

is a maddening

experience.