Coaching Is the Answer to Employee Engagement

Jon Lokhorst, CPA, CSP, PCC Leadership Coach, Your Best Leadership LLC
Enhancing Your Ability to Lead

Gallup’s research provides a startling view of employee engagement in the workplace today. Their most recent survey revealed that only 30% of workers in the United States are engaged in their jobs, down from 33% in 2023, marking the lowest engagement level since 2013. The stark decline is cause for alarm, as employee engagement continues to drive crucial business outcomes, like productivity, profitability, customer loyalty, safety, and employee retention.

Making matters worse, workers’ engagement decline is most pronounced among individuals under age 35, those who often work exclusively from home, and in-person workers whose jobs could be done remotely.

On the brighter side, top-performing organizations have maintained engagement levels far better, with engagement scores as high as 70%. That’s because workers in these organizations are supported by coaching managers who combine flexibility with accountability, according to Gallup. Compound this with the fact that a worker’s engagement is often largely driven by their relationship with their direct boss, becoming a better coach seems like a surefire way to boost team and company performance. Here are three tips for developing essential coaching skills that’ll help increase employee engagement.

1. BE COACHABLE

To be a good coach, you need to also be coachable. Unfortunately, based on the data mining of thousands of 360-degree assessments in their database, leadership development firm Zenger-Folkman found that leaders are perceived to be less coachable as they advance and age. Yet, leaders who score in the top 20% for coachability are rated as highly effective leaders overall, four times as often as leaders who score in the bottom 20%.

To increase your coachability, Kevin D. Wilde, author of “Coachability: The Leadership Superpower,” suggests this five-point roadmap:

• Value self-improvement and growth.
• Seek feedback from others on how to improve.
• Respond openly with curiosity and understanding.
• Reflect on the message to determine if it’s useful for growth and development.
• Act on the feedback with small, sustainable steps toward improvement.

2. MASTER ESSENTIAL COACHING SKILLS

The International Coach Federation (ICF), a leading source of professional standards for coaches, is the organization I gained my professional coaching credential from. They define coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity, and leadership.”

Among the competencies in the ICF model I learned, five essential skills stand out for incorporating coaching into your leadership style:

• Engage in active listening. The U.S. Institute of Peace defines active listening as “a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding.” Simply put, active listening involves talking less. In fact, most professional coach trainings suggest that coaches shouldn’t talk more than 20% of the time. The best listeners observe and fully focus on the other person, avoiding distractions that take their attention away. In coaching, active listening also involves listening for what’s not being said and being alert for what that communicates. Good active listeners read nonverbal communication, recognize subtle cues in the other person, and pick up on patterns and outliers in comments that provoke curiosity.
  
  
• Ask powerful questions. By asking perceptive questions, you reflect listening and understanding to the other person. These questions help clarify meaning, encourage discovery, and generate insights. They’re also effective in challenging assumptions without being argumentative. Use powerful questions to help your team members move toward their goals. For example, if they’re stuck on an important project, a simple question such as, “What is your next step?” will help them formulate a plan to move forward.
  
  
• Deliver feedback. Feedback consists of sharing information and observations about an individual’s performance to encourage their growth and development. Of course, feedback offers dual purposes—it’s for the benefit of both the individual and organization. Often, feedback is too heavily focused on one of those groups without consideration for the other side.
  
  Remember, like coaching, early-career workers crave frequent and immediate feedback. It’s part of the world they’ve grown up in. For example, these workers likely grew up playing video games, which are built on constant feedback to help frame your next move. Also, think about the last time you stayed at a hotel. You’ve likely received a survey asking for feedback on your stay.
  
  Scott Halford, expert speaker and author of the book, “Be a Shortcut: The Secret Fast Track to Business Success,” offers these tips for giving productive feedback: create safety, be positive, be specific, be immediate, and be tough but not mean.
  
  
• Provide goal setting and action planning guidance. Coaching is forward-looking, helping the people being coached to reach their full potential. Use coaching to help your team members create specific goals that enable them to move forward. Before wrapping up your coaching conversations, ensure your team members are clear on their goals and what actionable steps they plan to take to meet them. The SMART acronym—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based—is a great starting point for establishing outcome goals. You can also go a step further by combining outcome goals with process goals, which identify crucial steps needed to achieve the desired outcome. Some of you may recall that my winter 2023 Insight column, “2 Types of Goals You Need to Succeed in the New Year,” offers some examples for creating these goals.
  
  
• Support accountability. Like feedback, accountability serves a dual purpose, addressing both individual and organizational needs. Accountability is a tool to inspire individuals to take ownership and responsibility for their performance and impact on organizational results and outcomes.
  
  Use accountability to promote your team members’ learning and development. Follow up on their commitments from prior coaching conversations. Affirm their progress, challenge them positively when needed, and encourage self-discipline so they aren’t dependent on you to carry out their commitments. After all, healthy accountability involves supporting team members without letting them off the hook.
  

3. PRACTICE COACHING

Your best approach to developing essential coaching skills is to put them into practice. Here’s a basic framework with questions you can use to guide the flow and direction of the conversation:

• Establish the focus of your session: “What would you like to work on today?”
• Determine the goal or desired outcome: “What would you like to take away from our session?”
• Explore the situation or issue: “How would you describe this challenge and its impact on you?”
• Identify potential solutions and actions: “What are some possible approaches to this challenge?”
• Create actions and follow up on commitments: “What’s your game plan to address this situation?”
• Review key outcomes and takeaways: “What’s been most useful from our coaching conversation today?”

This simple framework is flexible enough to use in a very brief, micro-coaching session or a more extensive coaching conversation that addresses complex situations.

Like any other leadership skill, gaining a mastery of coaching requires practice, reflection, and feedback. Find a peer partner to engage in reciprocal practice with while also jumping into real-time coaching with your direct reports. After all, developing your coaching skills will only elevate your effectiveness as a leader, deepen engagement with your team, and deliver successful results for your organization.

Related Content:

• Build Your Leadership on a Strong Personal Foundation: Your capacity for growth as a leader requires a strong foundation—start building it by answering these four questions.
• See How ‘FAR’ Your Leadership Can Go: Building flexibility, agility, and resilience are the keys to future-proofing your leadership.