When you have a line responsibility and manage a group of employees, you will recognize that each employee is at a different stage of his development. The job maturity varies, logically, per person. The situational management model provides good insights into the different styles that you can apply per employee to allow him to grow in his task maturity.
At a certain moment the employee reaches the point where he no longer needs to be task-oriented. He can judge for himself how he should do his job, but he still hesitates now and then. For employees in this development phase, a coaching style of management is the most effective.
If you are going to apply a coaching style, you may also want to start coaching with your employee. Some managers do the so-called bilateral conversation, a one-on-one conversation or just a monthly “refresh session”. Anyway, it is not so easy to conduct such a conversation properly.
Coach conversation
The biggest pitfall is that such a conversation becomes a disguised operational consultation. And then the intended effect of the conversation immediately disappears. The essence of such a conversation is that the employee continues to take his own responsibility and that you only support him in his thinking process. It must be an equal and, above all, no hierarchical conversation.
If you are just starting out with coaching conversations, this is not so easy. Below are some practical tips for when you start with coaching conversations:
Practical points of interest:
– Keep the conversation outside of your own office (consider a lunch outside the door)
– If you are in your own office, do not stay at your own desk, rather use a separate consultation table
– Sit in a 90 degree angle with respect to each other (i.e. not opposite each other). This promotes the sense of equality.
– Do not use a notebook, do not hold a pen, just take care of sincere attention (if you really need it, you can always write something down)
– Make sure you have a view of a clock, so that you can keep an eye on the time
Practical “rules of the game” to tell clearly at the first time:
“I do not have any agenda items for our discussions beforehand. I therefore do not prepare myself specifically. If you do have agenda items yourself, you simply call them at the beginning of our conversation or you can email me in advance”
“We will not talk about operational matters in our discussions. There we have the operational consultation for ”
“I am mainly for you and for what occupies you in the work. So I will not take action points from our discussions ourselves “
I often get questions from managers about what they should talk about in such a conversation and how to best start such a conversation.
A few practical opening sentences to get the conversation in the right direction:
“Tell me, what would you like to talk about?”
“We have a half hour together. How do you prefer to spend it? What do you want to talk about? “
“If you look back over the past few weeks, how do you look back on that? What did you learn for yourself? Where do you see any points of interest for yourself? “
And so on…
Coaching should be combined with watching and one of the parameters in employee supervision is time tracking. By using time clock , you can better monitor it. Hopefully this article is useful for you.
