Coaching Plans and Falling - Cultivated Management Newsletter
Howdy and welcome to this week's Cultivated Management newsletter. I hope you are having a good week.
Coaching Plans
Coaching your direct reports is an essential part of your job as a manager.
Often people think coaching plans are bad, that they are the same as Personal Improvement Plans (PIPS) (Other terms are often used). PIPS are usually improvement plans put in place before you exit someone from the business, so you can see why people are fearful of coaching plans. But coaching plans and PIPS are not the same thing.
Coaching plans are simply about personal development and growth.
Everyone in your team should have a coaching plan. They should all have some sort of plan that helps them move from where they currently are to where they want to get to. This is a coaching plan. It is often very basic. Some people will no doubt create their own if they are very self motivated, so you may find some people already have one.
Cultivated Managers often have their own, self directed, coaching plan. Many managers don't have good managers themselves who will help them with this.
Many managers don't do coaching plans because they feel they are too complicated or they don't know where to start. So here are some thoughts if you're not currently doing coaching plans for your team.
A coaching plan is nothing more than a list of resources and opportunities that help someone learn, grow or develop.
Start by working out what their current strengths and skills are. Strengths Finder 2.0, DISC and "VIA Survey of Character Strengths" are my go to trilogy of analysis tools, although simply discussing career progression and performance needs with your direct is good too.
Discuss where they would like to get to. What do they want to achieve? What position do they want? What skills would they like to develop? What projects or teams would they like to be involved with at work?
Start listing resources, or even better, ask your direct to go and research their own list to bring back.
These resources could be books, online videos, events, conferences, other people to speak to, meetings to attend, mini projects to pick up or anything else that can help them grow and improve.
Next add a deadline to each resource, giving ample time to complete the plan. Consider though, that not everyone learns at the same rate and not everyone will enjoy reading etc. So this should always be a very collaborative exercise.
Then document it all and make it visible to you and your direct.
Discuss it in maybe 1 out of 4 "one2ones"
As they work through the coaching plan it's important to keep checking it is still relevant. Don't be afraid to change it as you go.
I also tend to keep notes on what we discussed, how the plan is going and how it is changing. This is helpful should you do an annual review process.
So there you have it. Super simple coaching plans that make a difference.
One last thing. Many people believe they should add some useful measure or metric to a coaching plan so they can work out whether it made a difference or not. I'm not a fan of this and have never felt the need to measure anything more than complete/not complete and why not complete.
As soon as you put measures in place around each aspect of the coaching plan you risk turning this activity in to a performance plan, and you could sap all the enjoyment people should have around learning. Go carefully. No need to measure everything - especially around learning. Learning should be fun.
Book of the week
"How the mighty fall and why some companies never give in" is a good book. Enlightening as to why some companies disappear or achieve nowhere near what they had achieved in the past. But also why some companies, in roughly the same conditions, went on to thrive.
The book is by Jim Collins who wrote Good to Great and many other books. When studying the companies that went from good to great there were many that didn't last - why was that? This books aims to explain that.
The book highlights 5 stages of decline which are really interesting. There are lots of case studies and lots of insights for anyone leading change in a business. You can read a little more about the 5 stages on Jim Collin's website.
The book is a breezy read and full of insights you can apply to your own observations about how your company is progressing.
Until next time.
Rob..