Videos on Management Training with Roger Reece

Managers' Coaching Challenges
Each manager faces his or her own personal challenges on the road to being a better coach. For some, simply finding enough time to be an effective coach is a major hurdle. For others, the challenges may require a fundamental change in their thinking. For many managers, changing old attitudes about the nature of the employee/supervisor dynamic is the biggest challenge. Wherever you are in your development as a leader, there is always room for improvement. Overcoming deep-set habits and thought patterns requires practice and commitment.

Employee Coaching Roleplay
Sometimes, as a manager, you go to call an employee on the carpet for something they've done, and what gets unearthed is a bigger issue. You may discover a situation that you've been mishandling, or a problem that you've been ignoring, that has been instrumental in forming a negative worldview in your employee's perception. In those instances, you need to be big enough to acknowledge the issue. That doesn't mean you will ignore or forgive your team member's problem behavior, per se; you'll still be able to return to that in its own time. But if you want any credibility as a manager, your willingness to honestly and objectively listen to what your employees have to say, and to hold yourself to the same standards you expect from them, can never be in question. The worst thing in the world is a manager who won't admit to their own misdoings, but expects employees to admit to theirs.

Coaching Tools for Managers
If you're not already accustomed to building coaching relationships with your employees, it can be an enormous help to your development to spend a few moments on your own before and after a coaching session to think about what you want to happen as a result of it. Before the meeting, write down what you'd like to talk with the employee about, identify your goals for the future, and identify what you think you know about the employee's goals and intentions. During the meeting, take as many notes as you can while the discussion is in progress. Afterwards, while the meeting is still fresh in your mind, it's a good idea to expand on your notes and give your impressions of what you learned from the session and how well (or how badly) you think it went. This is especially helpful if you are just starting out in developing your skills as a coach.

Employee Coaching
When you bring an employee into your office to discuss a problem behavior, how you conduct yourself can have a bigger impact than you realize. You may think you have all the information you need about the problem you're discussing; the situation may seem cut-and-dried. But what you may find out (if you can manage to keep your own mouth shut and listen to what the employee has to say) can mean the difference between another instance of employee turnover to drain the resources of your company, and an opportunity to groom a potential candidate for future promotion from within the organization.

Resonant Management
A great manager resonates with employees. When you have a conversation with another person, there is a residue left after you walk away that is made up of elements of Resonance and Dissonance. When you resonate with another person, you connect with them in a way you both can feel: you are energized by the interaction, you are productive on the things you collaborate on, and you feel better after the meeting than you did before. The opposite of this tuned-in feeling - a dissonant reaction - is equally apparent from an encounter. The important thing to remember is that dissonance is not the same thing as conflict, nor is it the necessary result of conflict. In fact, the best teams may have passionate differences of opinion between members. Great partnerships are not people who always agree - they are people who have learned how to maintain a strong foundation of mutual trust and respect, where each individual feels that their voice is heard and their input is valued.

Employee Behavior Coaching Goals
The key to effectively changing problem behavior in an employee (or otherwise) is in getting them to see what they're not seeing. It's a hard thing to do and oftentimes you aren't able to do it. But when your goal as a manager is compliance, it almost never happens: because as soon as you begin wielding that heavy authority, all they see is you. 'Contribution' is an important concept in conflict management: whenever there is conflict, no single factor (or person) is ever completely, 100-percent responsible - and when a manager is involved, usually that manager has contributed to the problem in some way. It's important that you, as the manager, recognize your contribution, and don't put all the blame on the employee. Your goal is to build up this employee, to help them succeed; always keep this long-term goal in mind when dealing with the situations of the day.

Employee Coaching Technique
What is the most important question of a coaching session? When you engage in a coaching session with an employee about a conflict or behavior problem, the first question you ask is also the most important: "What was your goal?" You ask this question referring to a specific behavior - for example, "What was your goal for saying what you said to a coworker at the meeting yesterday," or "What was your goal for being late?" This is not a rhetorical question, nor is it a time for sarcasm or blame. You want to get an answer to this question, because you are attempting to establish a tone of outcome-focused coaching, and also because you are not so presumptuous that you assume you already know what the person is thinking. The person you are coaching may at first respond by venting. It is extremely important that you give them the space to do so. They may need to let off some steam about frustrations that have been building up, and at the same time you need to demonstrate that you are willing to listen to them, that they will be heard. But come back around to the question, rephrase it if you need to, stay with it and be comfortable with silence until you get a real answer. What they say will largely determine the course of the coaching session from there.

Employee Performance Coaching
Coaching to improve employee performance is about changing employees' behavior and their mental models (the way they see the world) as well. Our models for interpreting the world are formed by our experiences. We start to develop our maps for determining the how and why of the world at a very young age, in a random, 'triage' manner; but mental models can change and grow throughout a person's life. Our responsibility as managers is to get to the heart of our employees' mental models; and, through coaching, to help employees to develop or shift their thinking in ways that are more ecological to the team and to their own personal development. Coaching is not just another way to get compliance. It is about facilitating your employees' self-development, helping them to see their blindspots and leading them to the right frame of mind to achieve greater rewards for themselves and for the team.

Employee Retention Strategies
Retain talent and develop your employees: It may seem counter-intuitive, but as a manager, one of your most reliable means of retaining talent is to keep a continual focus on the employee's own potential for career growth and development. Plenty of managers jealously guard their most valuable people, and some even go so far as to hinder the career advancement of their employees out of a fear of losing good talent. But this practice is counter-productive in both the short-term and the long-term. The more talented and productive the associate, the more likely it is that you will eventually see them move on from your team - either through promotion inside the company, or else in a lateral move to a rival (if they don't see a clear-enough path to progress in your organization). Even taking for granted that the upward momentum of a high-value team-member means that we'll probably lose them at some point, there is still always a great deal to learn, a considerable amount of formal and informal training to go through, before a good individual producer is ready to make the transition to a supervisory role. And the team-member who is actively building the skills to become a viable candidate for advancement, is meanwhile bringing those skills to bear for the benefit of your team. And later on, the reward of seeing an employee whose development you've nurtured through coaching rise to become a colleague brings clear personal and professional benefits as well.

Effective Employee Coaching
Establish the context for your message to be heard. In coaching employees, there is an inseverable connection between Content and Context. Before you can hope to get your message across, you must first establish the right context for your message to be received. When you get the employee in your office, sometimes the mood can be very intense. It's your job to lighten it up. For coaching to succeed, your employee must first be open and receptive to the process. Your role is to minimize defensiveness: your well-meaning message will not get through while the employee's defenses are up. Make sure they see that your goal is not to punish them for something in the past, but to help them achieve better results in the future.

Management, Leadership & Followership
Effective leaders must be effective followers. The reality of leadership is that we all have different perspectives, and nobody is right all the time. We get to the right path through teamwork and consensus, and the best leaders are the ones who are open to being led, at times, by others. Effective leadership is not a monarchy; an effective leader is not a ruler with irreversible decisions. True leaders can take input that may contradict their ideas completely, and do not have such an attachment to their beliefs or sense of authority that they can't accept modifying the course of action of their team.