PEOPLE SMARTS: Gold Medal Coaching

The 2006 Winter Olympics are over and all that remains are vivid memories and impressions about how sports really mirror life. I watched every night of the speed skating events and how Chad Hedrick performed on his way to winning multiple medals in what is  one of the most grueling and training-intensive sports.
 
After months and years of preparation, Hedrick still needed event-by-event advice from his coach who was sitting in the stands near the ice. There they were, communicating back and forth and making the necessary corrections in his techniques and approaches.
 
Coaching is a regular and natural method to improve performance in the world of sports and athletics. Owners of exterior and interior landscape companies can learn from these principles and become more effective coaches as well as help employees improve their performance.
 
Becoming a good coach in our industry is a process composed of some thoughtful, well-defined steps.

• Define what an unsatisfactory performance is. If you are not getting the desired results you want because of the fact that someone is performing unsatisfactorily, then you need to define what that person should do differently so that he/she is able to achieve the desired result. This holds most true for operations and sales performers.
• Expend your coaching time wisely. Stay focused on the main events of performance. Don’t become side tracked into spending time on isolated incidents or incidents over you which you have no control and, in the final analysis, have little to do with improving performance.
• Determine whether people know  their performance is not what it should be. Your employees should have some measure of what is expected of them so they can see how they are performing against that standard.
• Determine legitimate reasons why an employee cannot do what is expected. Sometimes, when we take the time to see the job as an employee sees it, we realize  there are obstacles that prevent a person from performing well. These obstacles may be beyond the control of the employee. A good coach removes these obstacles.
• Ensure people have adequate job training. This sounds obvious, but in many cases we assume  people either know their jobs well or they have received the necessary training to perform well.
• Do not set the reward for high performance as more negative than positive. Sound familiar? A good example of this is rewarding your top operations worker with more work because he or she finished their assigned tasks before everyone else. Once they see this happen a few times, how do you think they will adjust their performance?
• Are you rewarding employees who don’t perform very well? Sometimes we overuse our good employees by continually assigning very important tasks to them that we need done correctly and quickly. Meanwhile, their co-workers whom we do not view as being as competent are sitting back with far less to do than they should. These non-performers get their raises and keep their jobs just as if they were carrying their fair share of the load. Does this scenario sound really familiar?
• Do you really believe this person could perform the job if he/she really wanted to do it? It’s judgment time. If the answer is, “No,” then you have a decision to make about the future of this employee in your company.
   
  The resulting action can become a real “gut-check,” but that is what coaching is all about.