Management Coaching - Teach The Boss
Many companies hire managers for no reason other than that they have managed people before, in some capacity at some point, and are therefore assumed to know what they're doing. They then discover, to their cost, that their managers' knowledge is outdated or not relevant to the situation that they find themselves in. Training is necessary to become a good manager. Management skills don't come any more naturally than cooking skills, and require assistance to maximize.
This is the time that management coaches come in. One of the most important resources human resources can provide is the kind of management coaching that turns a mediocre manager into the leader of a all-star team. There's a reason that top CEO's of Fortune 500 companies spend a combined total of millions in one to one training with the world's most elite coaches. That reason is that even someone with as many successes as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs knows that he doesn't know it all.
An analogy can be drawn with the field of music - George Gershwin took lessons in harmony from other composers, at a time when he was the most famous and well-paid living composer in the world! If the leaders of the world take personal coaching, isn't that a good indication that management coaching is an important part of bringing out the best in your management team?
Of course, one has to ask: where do you draw the line? Does everyone in a supervisory position need management coaching? Does a project leader? Lead engineer? Merely "senior" engineer, managing only themselves? The answer to each of these is a clear "yes."
Everyone who makes management decisions needs coaching, and the reason is that no one is perfect. We all had to learn things somewhere, but changes in the world (especially increases in business efficiency) require us to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. Like the kid's saying "you snooze, you lose", managers who receive no training "lose". They lose their edge, their team's advantage, and, if they are particularly bad managers, they might even lose their workforce.
An angry lapse will never destroy a team, a bad day will never mean a bad month, and teams are led, not just managed, when they are the focus of competent management coaching. For your management team as much as for any Fortune 500 CEO, raising leaders doesn't happen without investing in them, and management coaches are by far the most proactive way of doing that.
When companies provide management coaching, even mediocre managers can strive to become excellent leaders. Such training is best when it is also imparted through personal coaching. Good management coaches provide an edge to a manager's abilities, increasing his strengths and reducing his weaknesses. From the organization's point of view, it has much to gain from training its managers, as, for example, bad managers de-motivate people working with them and soon become problems for human resources manager. However, even excellent managers need to be coached to keep them abreast of latest developments and techniques.
Published July 20th, 2007
Filed in Management