Desperate times call for desperate measures.
What would you call the 2021 job market if not desperate?
After all the layoffs, career changes, and stress since March 2020, it’s no wonder things haven’t settled down. There are candidates flooding interviewers' inboxes with resumes, but those companies are still struggling to find qualified candidates. Compounding that are the moving targets of employee expectations and volatile market conditions.
As a company, sometimes you just have to take any warm body to fill a seat, right?
Well, it can solve a short term problem while building a long term headache. Sure, you’ll have someone there to assign work to. Does that mean they’ll thrive there and help the company thrive?
The real question is: Who is on your bus?
From movie Speed (1994). All right reserved by 20th Century Fox.
Jim Collins likened a company to a bus. Each seat has an ideal person to sit there. Anyone CAN sit there, but SHOULD they? Folks could just be jumping on your bus because it’s there or maybe they like where it’s going.
The journey becomes smoother for everyone when the right people are in the right seats. The company leader is the bus driver and they are ultimately responsible for who gets on the bus, even if someone else is handing out the boarding passes.
You can fill your bus with the best possible players when you leverage coaching to go beyond the surface and really learn an employee’s skills and aspirations. People who WANT to be there, become invested in success, and take pride in it. That may sound like a fairytale, but no one has time to chase unicorns. It’s real when you use coaching.
“Coaching” has become a tainted buzz word, but it's much more than the cliche it’s become over the last few years. For a Catalytic Coach, it’s not executive counseling or rebranding reviews. Instead, it’s a focused process that opens and guides communication designed to connect a manager with their direct report on a deeper level. That will ultimately enable the manager to coach the individual and team to greater success.
Cultivating a high performing team and a Top-Workplaces culture takes three key components:
An Employee’s Skill
That Employee’s Interest
The Organization’s Need
Sometimes we have individuals that lack drive. Maybe they lost it along the way. Maybe it was never there. Either way, they just won’t make an effort anymore. This challenges the manager to break through the barriers or change who is sitting on the bus. With coaching, that employee can be given a chance to reinvigorate themselves and become the team contributor their manager knows they can be. The process also speeds up the pace of these attempts to rekindle that employee, so no one ends up wasting their time trying to keep someone on the bus that doesn’t really want to be there. As scary as it is to have an empty seat on your bus, it’s scarier when that dead weight slows your bus to a crawl.
As much as we want to cater to our employees’ dreams though, the needs of the organization must be met. Can’t accommodate someone’s aspirations? Coaching gives managers the opportunity to explain company needs while also opening the door for building skills or passing along knowledge that can help that employee attain their dream one day.
How to Get Started:
Learn to Listen: Build real listening skills into your leadership style. When your employees genuinely feel heard, they’ll be more invested in your company and eager to find their right seat on the bus.
Think Systemically: Find a system that provides a proven structure of documented conversations centered around cascading strategic needs and initiatives while developing and growing your talent.
Educate: Train your managers to think like coaches. Train employees to be coachable. Coaching is a skill that can be taught and improved with education, mentoring, and practice.
Speed It Up: When your check engine light comes on, you don’t want to wait too long before you get it into the mechanic. Your bus needs attention quickly or it’ll break down entirely. Solve those performance problems expeditiously. It should only take days or weeks, never months or years to resolve issues with poor performers.
Take a Sample of One: Realize that each person on your bus is unique. They aren’t replicas of anyone else. No two Boomers are going to think exactly alike. No two Millennials are motivated by exactly the same thing. Tailor your coaching to the individual and they’ll come together as a team.
