Common Coaching Complaints from Managers October 7th, 2008

Heather McCulligh

Last week I picked up a study from Chief Learning Officer through this post at on The HR Capitalist. The study, “The Coaching Conundrum 2008” looked at some of the challenges that managers face when it comes to coaching. The study was conducted by BlessingWhite and surveyed 710 North American managers.

The two biggest challenges? Not having all the answers and coaching takes too long, at 30 and 29 percent respectively. I don’t think there’s any surprises here because let’s face it too many managers simply don’t like having to do coaching as it is one more thing on their to-do list.

I don’t think anyone expects managers to have all the answers, but there should be more focus on ensuring coaching isn’t about “answers” and more about opening up a dialogue between managers, employees and anyone else who needs to be involved. HR needs to makes sure that managers have the information they need for, at a minimum, the most important answers they may need to give to employees. The reality is that you can’t spoon feed everyone, but you can take this objection off the table by making information available and changing Q&A interactions into daily conversations between managers and employees.

As for “coaching taking too long”, well, managers need to understand that this is part of their job. Expectations need to be set from day one that moving into management is more than a title change and a pay raise and that coaching is a big part of the job. In fact, perhaps you should look at setting goals related to coaching for managers so that they understand how important coaching is to the organization as a whole.

For HR, there needs to be a greater focus on ensuring managers have the tools they need to be good coaches, starting with the understanding that coaching is a day-to-day thing and not a once-a-year event. As we’ve seen with many of our customers, using an employee performance management system with goal tracking and performance journals can quickly change how managers think and execute on training as they have the impetus and information they need to be successful.

Other challenges cited in the survey include: I have too many direct reports (16 %), I don’t see the results of my effort (10%), I am not sure where to start (9%), I am not comfortable having coaching discussions (4%) and I don’t like to coach (1%). I’m sure as an HR professional, you’ve heard any of these before, and a lot of it can be dismissed as complaining. That said, why not take a minute and assess what your managers may say about coaching in your organization and how your team can eliminate or at least neutralize these complaints?

Tags: coaching, goal management, performance management