[MUSIC] Welcome back. So far in this course, we've talked about some elements that make for effective coaching practices. We've also talked about how it's important that a coaching practice is consistent. In this video, I want to take some time to address what some of the benefits of a consistent coaching practice are, as well as the problems that can arise if you don't have a consistent coaching practice. We have a lot to discuss in this video, so let's get started. I've been talking a lot about coaching practice and putting something in place and in the next couple of videos, we are going to talk about what that looks like and how you can build that for your team. I wanted to address just really quickly what some of the pros and cons are of having a consistent practice as a manager. Some of the pros, let's just talk about that. First of all, people know what to expect. People want to know what to expect. If you create a structure that helps them know what to expect, it's so amazing. They know when they will have time with you. Despite what I think a lot of managers think about themselves and their employees, employees like time with their boss. Even if you don't have a tremendous relationship, they like the opportunity to know that they can talk about things that are concerning them, get through things that they need to work on, get answers to their questions. It makes a huge difference in terms of the relationship that you cultivate with your employees, when you create time for them. The other advantage to having a consistent practice is that it decreases your interruptions. I hear this so much from managers. They are constantly bombarded by their team members everyday and so they don't get their work done. That's a constant complaint of managers, is I can't get my work done because I'm so busy answering all these questions of my team. So that's a boundary issue that a lot of managers need to learn how to address, and we're not going to address that on this video. But what I will say is that if your team members know that they are going to have a meeting with you every Wednesday at 2:00, or every other Wednesday at 2:00, a lot of times, some of those things that seem feel really urgent to them because they never know when they are going to get to see you. They'll wait, and they'll address it when they meet with you, instead of coming to your office at 9 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, with a question that may or may not be terribly urgent. Having a consistent practice really helps you manage your time better and I think it also really helps employees know what to bring to you and what to wait to talk to you about. It helps us all recognize that we all have work to do and there's going to be a dedicated time for us to connect. Setting up a consistency of practice, the other advantage to that is it really minimizes any kind of potential for people to think you play favorites. I haven't talked much about that but it is an issue. A lot of employees believe that some employees are liked better than them by their manager. Here's the truth, there are people that we like better. That's just being a human being. But as a manager, how much you like someone should never be relevant to how much time you dedicate to working with them. If you have a consistent practice in place, where you're meeting with everybody for the same amount of time consistently, there's no difference. Therefore, there's really not the ability for someone to come and say hey, you play favorites. Or the opposite of which could be if I'm not performing and you're spending a lot of time with me that maybe you pick on me, that you're picking on me. One of the problems then that a lot of managers face is that they don't coach and then when someone isn't performing, they start spending time with them to see if they can manage their performance. Then it leads employees to be able to say hey, wait a minute, you're spending a lot of time with me, are you picking on me? A consistency of practice really helps you as a manager demonstrate that you are coaching and managing everybody through the same process in the same way. Now some of the cons, if you don't have a consistency of practice, are the flip of everything I just said. People can accuse you of playing favorites; of not spending time with the folks who need development; of only spending time with people who aren't performing and therefore, you're sort of isolating them and causing problems for them specifically. They might even think that you are picking on them. It causes morale issues if you only talk and work with people who are not performing because then when they get called into your office they're afraid of you. It can also be the opposite. If you only work with people that you enjoy, you only spend time with people that you enjoy spending time with, that can cause morale issues on the team and suspicion of what it might be that you're talking to them about because nobody else gets time with you. It definitely increases your workload. If you don't have consistent coaching practice, there is much more likelihood that your going to have employees at your door all the time asking you questions. If they know that they're going to get dedicated time with you, it's much more likely that they will wait to talk to you about those things, like I mentioned. Another con to not having a consistent practice is you don't really know what's going on with your team. You might be good at having meetings with your team members but this one-on-one time is where you really are able to connect with them one-on-one and identify even future issues that might just be brewing that you would not know about. One of the things as being a manager is you just don't want to be caught off guard, you don't want to be surprised and having a consistent coaching practice allows for that. It allows for you to connect and understand what's going on. Lastly, I would say a con for not having a consistent practice is just that disconnection. We know that people want to believe that what they do matters. They want to work with people that care about them. They want to have authentic connections. When we are disconnected from the person who's involved with helping us move up in our career, with helping make decisions about our compensation, it causes disengagement. What we know is that most people leave managers, they don't leave of companies. So, not connecting with people is a big barrier to helping them improve performance and helping them stay engaged. We want to keep all of this in mind when we're thinking about designing a coaching practice. It's not just about functional performance and helping the team be better but it is a lot about that, but it's not just about that. This is about really building relationships with people, fostering those relationships and anticipating how best to support your folks, as you move forward and help them perform, and ultimately, help them grow in the organization. In our next couple videos, we're really going to talk about what is this practice and how to put it into place? How to really help your employees receive this practice if it hasn't been in place in the past. A consistent coaching practice helps people know what to expect, it decreases interruptions. As a manager, if you're getting a lot of people flying in and out of your door, if you have a consistent practice set up in place, they can start to trust that they're going to have time with you. It also diminishes the ability to believe and to actually prove that you might be playing favorites if you are consistently meeting with people across the board. Inconsistent coaching practices creates some issues. It creates morale issues, it can create increased workload for you. There can be a lot of surprises in your work that you're not anticipating and it also creates disconnection between you and your staff. We really want to get to a place where you can have some consistency in your coaching practice, so that you can develop much better relationships with your team and also have a much better sense of how performance is going.
