The Benefits of Team Coaching
Coaching Tools You can Use in Your Business
According to the Harvard Business Review, coaching your employees may be the single most important skill for strong leaders. In a study of Fortune 100 companies, the majority of leaders reported that coaching improved productivity, quality, and teamwork. Coaching can also lift morale and lower turnover.
I think there is nothing more refreshing and admirable than a company who employs certified coaches for their employees. Google does it!
Coaching is a skill, an artwork, and a profession requiring specific education, continuous personal development, and an understanding of different assessment tools.
Coaching is about actively listening and engaging in empathic conversation. It’s about giving direction, through asking the right questions and waiting for the answers. It’s about feeling for the answers that lie buried within.
Unlike consulting, coaching digs deep into people’s wants, needs, and fears. And unlike therapy, coaching spends very little time in the “has been” of the past and focuses on the present and the future.
Here are a few questions I ask my clients over and over:
- Where are you now?
- Where do you want to be in a year from now?
- What’s working for you right now?
- What isn’t working for you?
But there’s more. Coaching is an art form. It’s about intuition, about when to speak and when to listen, about the soft skills that create trust, and the hard skills that create change. Most importantly coaching is about understanding personalities.
Most coaches use some form of assessment tool to understand their clients better. And it’s something a lot of companies are starting to do also. It’s an opportunity to understand your employees better. Now you can understand:
- Why they do that
- Why they say that
- Why they react like that
There are a lot of different assessment tools out there right now. Here are a few I like to use. I think they would be beneficial in your business also:
- Myers Briggs—this is always a favorite. It gets the conversation started amongst your employees and people in general. You can find the Myers-Briggs test online.
- The 5 Love Languages—I used to think this was a quiz only for romantic relationships but I know better now. It’s a quick online test that gets you thinking about why some people make you feel like you’re on cloud nine and others like you don’t matter. It’s great for figuring out personality clashes at work. Click here for the online quiz.
- DiSC profile— this assessment tool is used by millions of people every year. This personality test shows you how you respond to conflict, what motivates you, what causes you stress and how you solve problems.. You can find several DiSC tests online.
- CVI assessment—a newer assessment tool that explains your innate nature and how you are wired to think, act, and communicate. It can be used to increase personal awareness, improve teamwork, hire the right person for the job, or match people with jobs to create only top performers. Unlike other personality tests, this character-assessment boasts a 94% repeat reliability rate. Click here to take the assessment.
Coaching will do wonders for your employees. Who doesn’t want to talk to someone who understands them, who cares about their wants, needs, and desires, and who takes an active interest in their emotional well-being? If you don’t want to hire a coach quite yet, you will now have some tools to start you on your path to understanding “them” better. Because in the long run, your business problems always come back to your people problems. As Steve Covey said: “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Dr. Jung is a professional coach working with individuals and small businesses eager to invest in their personal growth, their leadership skills, and their teams. She helps you thrive by tapping into those values most important to you and your team. It’s her mission to solve your personal challenges and your people problems by creating a positive and emotionally safe workplace for you and your employees.
Dr. Jung heals businesses from the inside out; she looks for the causes behind your challenges and addresses those, not just the symptoms.
She is dedicated to turning your company into an efficient, organized, and happy business that will thrive even when you are out of the office. Click here to learn more.
