“Coaching for
Performance Is Not Merely a Fad or Craze, It’s The Essence Of
Growing And Sustaining Your Value Teams”
I see one of
the biggest challenges that healthcare organizations face after they
have establish their value teams is how to continually grow the
team’s people, performance and purpose. Most organizations believe
this can be accomplished through the old paradigm of command
and control, (“you do it because I said to or else”), which
will just push and pull your value team members in the wrong
direction.
Manage By
Coaching For Peak Performance
A much more
productive way to grow your value team’s people, performance
and purpose is to coach them to peak performance by having
your value team aware and responsible for:
ü
SETTING GOALS to insure
mutual and individual ownership
ü
KEEPING A LASER FOCUS
on the work at hand to increase the team’s motivation
ü
PROMOTING AWARENESS of
what’s really happening so that team members and team leaders can
make positive changes
ü
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
for their individual and team results
ü
FREQUENT REALITY CHECKS
along the way to insure clarity in judgments
ü
CONTINUAL FEEDBACK for
learning and performance improvement
ü
ASKING EFFECTIVE QUESTIONS
so that team members can think for themselves
ü
DEVELOPING OPTIONS when
individual team members or team leaders are stuck
ü
SUPPORTING DECISIONS to
move tasks and processes forward
ü
PROMOTING ACTION steps
so that timely change can happen now
As these
coaching goals suggest, coaching is a new way of managing to
get the job done and developing your people and your value team at
the same time. It involves being supportive,
non-threatening and mentoring vs. dictating what you want
done. To do so, you will need to boost your people and leadership
skills.
Who Should Be Your Value Team’s Coach?
Team coaching
is similar to any team sports (e.g., baseball, football, hockey,
basketball, etc.) in that there are always more than one
coach on a team. In baseball you have batting, pitching and fielding
coaches (to name just a few coaching positions) in addition to the
team’s manager.
Just like a
baseball team a value team has multiple coaches (team
leader, administrative representative and facilitator), who should
all be acting as team coaches, just like a baseball team’s batting,
pitching and fielding coaches. However, the primary
responsibility for coaching your value team lies with your team
leader (or manager) and facilitator.
Benefits Of
Coaching For Peak Performance
If you are
looking for a new and better way to dramatically improve your
value team’s performance, productivity, learning, quality,
creativity and adaptability, then you must consider the benefits
of adopting a coaching management style to grow your value
team’s people, performance and purpose.
The
alternative, as I see it, is for you to continue with your command
and control methods which use a carrot and a stick
philosophy and with which you will never move beyond meager savings
and quality gains. Until you decide to coach your value team to
develop their own goals, understand their own reality, search
for their own options and choose to take
responsibility for their actions your value team won’t improve their
people, performance and purpose no matter how many carrots and
sticks you give them.
by
Robert T. Yokl, President