Five Key Qualities that Enable a Manager to Effectively Coach Employees:

1. Self-awareness – Understanding our own leadership style when we are in the role of coach and how our style is perceived by others will provide us valuable information, guiding an ongoing fine-tuning to evaluate what practices during the coaching conversations are needed to be revisited, reinforced, or modified to improve our coaching skills.

2. Rapport – The level of connection in terms of how comfortable and relaxed both coach and coachee can feel during a coaching conversation. This can make a big difference in the process. This approach also includes how frankly and openly both can speak to each other without feelings of defensiveness. Developing an appropriate environment and building a constructive relationship between manager and employee will increase the level of rapport.

3. Active listening – This process involves a conscious effort to focus on what and how the other person is communicating and keeping from being distracted by our own thoughts – including our phones or that email we received from our boss just before the session. The objective is to remain curious, suspending own judgment, and to show a genuine interest in “hearing” what the individual is expressing verbally and non-verbally. Also, remember that it is not only about what is being said, but also confirming what was understood. Repeat back keywords and phrases in a timely manner to reflect to the individual what you hear them saying.

4. Use questions skillfully – Being able to help others to tap their own resources to find answers or different ways to achieve a goal is at the heart of the purpose of coaching. This process requires the ability to ask powerful questions instead of providing an answer, as well as constructively challenging the individual through powerful questions to find patterns (ah, there are those patterns again), contradictions, limiting beliefs, or anything that might be preventing the person from achieving the expected goal.

5. Create commitment – The last piece in transforming a coaching conversation into a valuable experience toward achieving a goal is accountability. The closing part of a coaching dialogue requires the same finesse demonstrated previously by the coach; this means asking versus telling. This time, the powerful questions are oriented to help the individual to connect insights (e.g. a pattern, blind spot, road block) discovered during the conversation to internal resources (e.g. knowledge, experiences, skills and traits) that motivate the coachee to take a specific and tangible action in the direction of the goal. This genuine and voluntary commitment within ones-self creates a positive level of accountability for sustainable change.

In summary, these first two sections encourage leaders to master the art of coaching through developing five core characteristics that will enable them to shift the mindset of having a traditional supervisor-employee dialogue to that of coach-coachee that requires skillful inquiry and active listening and uses the right level of rapport to help the employee to identify and achieve goals faster by channeling their own internal resources.