Manager must be a coach to help improve performance of his team

If manager do not become skilled at coaching their team, it is doubtful that they will be able to attain the long term results not only for themselves but also their organizations. If a manager wants to be a leader, he or she must develop the ability to coach others. Coaching is an essential skill required by every successful manager in this new business era. Command or control leadership of managing team have gone long ago.

Coaching demands skill and time. Or I can say Knowledge and patience. Before playing a coach role managers must understand the purpose of coaching.

Let’s refer a quotation on leadership “Leader is not a person who can perform better than his team but the person who inspires his team to perform better than he can". This can be achieved exactly by good coaching. The objective of coaching is the same. In simple words, coaching is the act of helping his team to perform better.

Through coaching we can either target to develop entirely new skills or helping to improve the performance of a non performer or enhancement of existing skills. However, good coaching by managers will surely speed up the progress of employees and take their organizations a head high in the competition.

The question here is "why all the managers will not become coaches?" I see the below reasons.

1. They don’t understand the value of coaching.

2. Lack of skills.

3. Due to work pressure they may not get time.

How to overcome these barriers is the question. Here are the solutions.

1. Apply the rules on self: You cannot force the managers coaching responsibilities those whose attitudes always see "what is in it for me?"  So showcase them the success stories of managers or business man in their organization to seize the opportunity to learn how to become an effective coach. Once they understand "something in it for me" then they achieve stronger results through the efforts, they will understand results can be yield not from commanding the employees but from coaching others.
2. Coaching is compulsory: Tell the managers very clearly to take coaching as a basic responsibility to create a coaching organization. As I described, coaching required time and skill. So provide them to the managers.
3. Train the managers on coaching skills and make them to practice.
4. Assign a coach to every manager: I suggest organizations to assign a coach to every new manager on day one of his joining, as a part of induction. Practical course is more effective than class room training. He will experience the benefits of coaching and become more committed to the practice. If you don’t have coaches, hire external coaches to work with your managers.
5. Reward the best coaches: Managers who are top performers are obviously best coaches. Encourage them by providing challenging roles and reward them. Message goes to entire organization.

I am not a coach but stood as a successful manager and honoured with titles including leadership excellence award from President HR when I was working with Reliance Communication as a Head HR for Andhra Pradesh. Please leave your comments.

Regards

Ram

ADR Group

Services: Infra & Fire Fighting| Property | Education | Product Promotion

Difference between Business HR & Conventional HR

Corporate HR and Business HR are terms used to distinguish area of operations. In organizations which are concentrated on single core business the terms are one and the same.

There has been an increasing awareness in the past decades that HR functions were like an island for cool comfort jobs which are far away from the hard world of real business. In fact I have received many such comments on this from colleagues who were headed departments like Sales, IT, Finance, Customer care etc. In order to justify its own existence HR functions had to be connected with the strategy and day to day running of the business side of the organization.

Here is a small attempt to distinguish between Business HR and Traditional HR. Actually, the question behind writing this small article is “what roles can be identified for the current day HR department in the context of increasing globalization of the corporate domain?”

I used to perform the below KRA in previous organizations apart from the conventional HR operations. I introduced new revenue models in my previous organizations, increased profit ratio, enjoyed the pressure too and stood as a successful leader. Often, I happened to receive a query from HR community that “why not a CEO from HR background?”. Who will stop you if you handle the below KRA.

Business HR:

·    The primary goal of Business HR is to increase employee productivity by focusing on business obstacles that occur outside of human resources.

·   The primary actions of Business HR are to identify key HR areas where strategies can be implemented in the long run to improve the overall employee motivation and productivity.

·  Ensuring Effective Manpower planning, recruitments, training & skills development, provide effective supervision and leadership, grievances handling and retention of team.

·    Plan and direct the organization’s activities to achieve stated/agreed targets and standards for operational, quality, culture and statutory adherence.

·       Review and report performance / progress of the organization on a regular basis & ensure the efficacy of System.

·  Examine the functional operations and identify profit improvement / cost reduction opportunities.

·         P & L responsibility.

·    Maintain and develop organizational culture, values and reputation in its markets and with all staff, customers, suppliers, partners and regulatory/official bodies.

·         Engage, Build and maintain effective long-term relationships with key members of the client team and discussing future Trend in Operations.

·       Create cross-functional project teams to encourage team building & employee development in terms of Knowledge & Skills.

·  Conducting continuous audits on MIS to ensure compliance and sound functioning of the process.

Corporate HR:

Corporate HR can play a significant role in monitoring the implementation of corporate HR policies throughout subsidiaries. HR can thus become "Champions of processes", building commitment of top management, providing training for managers and monitoring these processes. Corporate HR has a social responsibility to ensure future leaders are sensitive to and equipped to deal with global challenges. This creates a new role for HR as ‘guardian of culture’, overseeing the implementation of global values and systems.

However in a diversified organisation there may be need to have Corporate HR and individual SBU or Business HR as each business may need to have unique business requirement.

When Organisations grew and they could see the visible impact of good HR practices in their bottom line, they wanted HR to reach out to where the business is, rather than be restricted to cool comforts of corporate Office. Both are one and the same for a small company where there is only one HR dept but for a large organisation which has large geographical spread or multi business environment, the HR team at the Corporate Office would be called Corp HR and the HR presence in individual businesses would be called Business HR.

For Ex. Recruitment strategies are handled at Business HR level and hiring also happens there. There is a small team of senior recruiters at corporate office to handle corporate openings. However, Rewards are managed centrally. Salary structures, annual increments guidelines etc are all planned at corporate level. Payroll processing is at corporate level however entry is done at business level. Training is handled at business HR level however succession planning is done at corporate HR level.

Please add your suggestions in the same page as the viewers of this page also read the same.

Regards

Ram

Ram.k.reddy@adrgroup.in