Doing things the easy way often means going back to redo them the right way eventually. The old saying goes “measure twice and cut once” for a reason. Of course taking that extra time also runs into another old adage: Time is money. Finding the right balance between quality and speed makes all the difference.
When the CEO of a mid-sized manufacturing company sat in on a Catalytic Coaching presentation, he thought he had it all figured out. He got a copy of the book to skim and even a free hardcopy of those yellow, blue, and green forms. It all seemed pretty straightforward, so he handed all that to his HR manager and excitedly told them to launch coaching for their employees.
Catalytic what now?! The HR manager had no idea what this stuff was. It didn’t line up very well with their traditional education on top of meaning a full replacement of the reviews they already knew so well. How was she even supposed to roll this thing out? Or track it, for that matter?!
She made photocopies of all the forms and gave them to all the managers. They weren’t quite sure what to make of it, but at least most of them attempted to use this new process they were thrown into. Unfortunately, the employees didn’t really get it either and they really didn’t trust this unknown system. What was this even for anyway?
Some managers used coaching as a bat to beat their direct reports into place. Many didn’t bother to start the process and most didn’t finish it. The ones that did get those forms filled out, dumped them on the HR manager’s desk to be filed away and never looked at it again.
In other words, it was a disaster.
And the CEO couldn’t understand why it didn’t work. It seemed so intuitive to him.
It would be years before another member of their leadership team would have the opportunity to hear Gary speak. They realized right away that entirely too much had been lost in translation and it was little wonder everyone had a bad taste in their mouth for “coaching.”
NOW they were ready for the sure-fire formula for scalable coaching success.
The Proven Process + Top-notch Training + A Terrific Tool = Success
Let’s break that formula down.
The Proven Process
Is there any greater waste of time than reinventing the wheel or being a guinea pig for an uncertain system?
Catalytic Coaching has been around for decades now. First developed in the 1990s after Gary saw how traditional reviews wrecked employees, he refined it and then officially published the book in 1999. Since then, organizations throughout the United States, Canada, and even Europe have implemented it. Just about every industry has used it, from healthcare to manufacturing to construction and more. Even the sizes have varied, with some companies having a handful of employees and others having several hundred.
It’s based on a simple formula of 3 Forms + 4 Kinds of Meetings + 5 Hours Per Employee Per Year. The first year always comes with a learning curve, which is why the next part is so important.
Top-notch Training
Implementation is more than just telling managers to coach. Everyone in the organization from the top leaders to the boots on the ground folks, need to understand two things about the process: how AND why.
Why the why? When you get the why of something, the how makes more sense. Change is never easy, especially when you’re introducing something that is fundamentally different from anything that’s been done before. Without knowing the reasoning behind it, employees can feel defensive, worried they’ll be exposing themselves or wasting their time.
Managers also have to be trained to understand what it means to be a coach. They’ll need to develop skills in two way communication, learning how to really hear everything the employee is telling them, including the things they aren’t telling them. Then that will need to be paired up with the organization’s need, which they get from the coaching their own supervisors or directors give them.
This is going to come easy for some, but not for everyone. Internal process champions called Coach2s go through an in depth training process that gives them the practical skills and ability to be the coach of coaches. They’re uniquely positioned to support Catalytic Coaching and strengthen both the training and the coaching process.
Simply having a form isn’t worth much. Knowing how to leverage it so that everyone wins is the real key.
A Terrific Tool
Now that you have the process and the training to do it right, you need something to make it as easy as possible. Something that will securely store the forms digitally, track the progress of the coaching process, give leadership access to reporting features that will let them leverage the data being collected, enable managers to easily access the coaching for their direct reports, send out reminders for meetings, and have training videos and other resources.
That’s why we partnered with Energage. They maintain the Catalytic Coaching Online software tool that strengthens and supports the process.
= Success
Now that you know all components, you have everything you need to get that solution. Want to know if this process will work for your company? Already use coaching, but need to revisit the formula?
That’s what we’re here for. Reach out to answers@catalyticcoaching.com and we’ll help you solve this equation for your organization.
Garold (Gary) Markle is the creator of Catalytic Coaching and author of Catalytic Coaching: The End of the Performance Review. He brings real world experience from 17 years in HR leadership in major corporations coupled with 20 years of teaching small and mid-sized organizations how to cultivate their leadership and ditch their detrimental performance reviews for a proven Coaching process.
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