By Mike Meagher,

Coaching, at its core, is about helping others perform at a higher level. It can contribute to correct underperformance, improve existing skills, or develop entirely new skills. Effective managers at all levels recognize the need to develop the employees they supervise. By helping others expand their capabilities and improve their performance, managers drive bottom line contributions to their departments and organizations. This is why coaching is a critical competency of managers.Coaching managers significantly increase commitment, engagement, and performance. Of course, these increases flow to their organization's bottom line.

1. Commitment is far more valuable than compliance.

Managing people isn’t what it used to be — or at least it shouldn’t be. For a whole range of reasons, traditional “task-oriented-only” approaches to management just aren’t as productive as they once were. Traditional methods of managing often included command-and-control and an over-reliance on lagging measures such as financial reports. Managers would often use carrot-and-stick methods to motivate. They would use incentives to bribe their employees into good behavior. When the unproductive behavior was present, managers used positional authority to course correct.  Both of these methods typically improve performance in the short term. But the gains that come with this plan don’t last. We realize now that compliant employees may get the job done, but committed ones do it better. The ability to coach is the difference between the leader who gains commitment and the one who only achieves compliance.

2. Removing barriers drives engagement.

Coaching managers pay close attention to the behaviors and activities that drive performance outcomes and real long-term impact. Coaching managers create a more efficient, aligned, and satisfied workforce.  Recent data on employee engagement indicates there is a high positive impact of coaching in a number of areas. A surprising result of the research was that employee’s place a very high value on managers helping them perform their jobs better.   Effective coaching helps an employee remove the internal and external barriers to performance. An employee’s satisfaction is affected significantly a coach helping them win in their role.

3. Individual and team performance improvements flow to the bottom line.

A good coaching manager can help an employee understand his/her role and how his/her performance affects the goals of the organization.  As Peter Drucker said and I paraphrase, the responsibility of the manager is to make sure the organization is successful.  This is true today as it was 25 years ago.  Today’s coaching managers maximize the work of those they supervise by coaching them to greatness.

Think of how Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski functions— building team culture, observing behavior, providing honest and timely feedback, and encouraging players to their best efforts every day.  The result: championships. It would be a dereliction of duty for him to wait until the last game of the season to give his players feedback. All week long performance is reviewed, and players are coached to improve their game. The team goes into the next game knowing what to do to perform better. Waiting for a year for a formal performance review results in missed growth opportunities. Coaching to improve good or bad performance, to engage employees, to challenge, to motivate, and build the team needs to be ongoing and timely.

4. Great coaching managers are in high demand.

Coaching is quickly becoming a required competency and characteristic associated with leadership.  Developing the skill of coaching for managers is not only important to those that they supervise and develop, but it is also a career booster for the manager. Organizations are looking for coaching ability in managers that will fill the leadership pipeline for senior positions.

If you want more committed, engaged employees that collectively achieve organizational goals, then develop your coaching competency.