A Research Paper By Adrian Baban, Coaching for Change Coach, ROMANIA
Feeling Great Through Coaching
Coaching has grown in awareness and importance for big or small organizations as the speed of change has increased over the last years. The transition from leading by authority to learning across the organization is different from one company to another, or from one culture to another. In a world that’s becoming increasingly more connected, it’s necessary for leaders to be able to communicate and enhance employee performance. This movement towards perseverance, agility, and inclusion across business boundaries requires leaders to act differently with all the colleagues they interact with, day by day.
The state of the workplace nowadays is really disheartening. Too many people suffer physically and psychologically because of unrelenting stress lack of meaning or scarce recognition and most of all distressing relationships with colleagues at work. There is a greater need for employee coaching to enable them to enhance collaboration and acquire new skills, behaviors, and the capabilities required to operate in a challenging and dynamic context.
Place of Feeling Great at Work
Motivating employees seems like it should be easy, but in real-life situations motivating them is far more challenging. Feeling good about your work creates higher motivation, retention, and engagement within the teams.
Creating a culture of coaching at your workplace implies various opportunities for human interaction and understanding.
One of the key insights to employees feeling good at work is that they want to be recognized as human beings. Leaders who are using coaching skills naturally end up respecting people’s fundamental needs. Based on SDT (Self-Determination Theory) the conditions for supporting the individual’s experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are argued to foster the most volitional and high-quality forms of motivation and engagement for activities, including enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity. Any of these three psychological needs supported within a social context will have a robust positive impact on wellness and recognition.
As a leader, it’s critical to embrace a radical mindset change by emphasizing the importance of active listening, asking open questions, and looking inward first to examine your relationship with change.
If you are not ready to change yourself, forget about changing your team and your organization,
- The first step is that the leader should refrain from pushing his/her view on the employee by asking questions that make you think and are honoring your autonomy. Curiosity is a critical behavior that the leader should practice in order to strengthen relationships and facilitate solutions. Staying in the helicopter view will help the leader to recognize your unique talents.
- Secondly, leaders must start with the assumption that they can think and have a solution to propose. In this way, they recognize your competence and help you to further explore and discover based on that. This creation helps to build a sense of pride and shared ownership across both the leader and you.
- Third, they engage with you to build on mutual trust create relatedness, and collaborate to honor each other’s humanity. In successful transformations, leaders and employees work together to co-create an environment where everyone feels a shared sense of ownership over the transformation vision and outcome.
Create Places of Feeling Great at Work
Burnout cultures where leading with authority is still practiced exhaust us through the week and force us to recharge on the weekends.
Healthy cultures enhanced by coaching behaviors provide daily space to refuel, improve our well-being, and create places of feeling great at work.
As a leader of creating a place of feeling great about each employee’s work through coaching, you need to embrace everything as if learning it for the first time, be authentic, and recognize the unique talents of everyone. Be open to exploring and learning in a different way, and be willing to try new things. Experiment.
Our organizations need extraordinary coaches! Employees are longing to grow, to be free from patterns that keep them stuck in order to reach a better place to work and a better life than they have today.
References
Marion Franklin - Master Certified Coach (lifecoachinggroup.com)
Theory – selfdeterminationtheory.org
Leaders Who Coach Are Creating Better Workplaces, and So Can You. | Saba Imru-Mathieu | Tedxlausanne - YouTube