Coaching is critical, but it’s not enough

Helping teams become more effective goes deeper than good coaching. While coaching is instrumental to creating change in performance, improving teams’ effectiveness requires much more.

One of the principles we follow is that no team should be disrupted without a clear payoff for the individuals and leaders in the team, for the organization and for its clients. We have witnessed organizations fail at achieving their improvement targets despite having made significant investments. These organizations were typically focused on one part of the solution without really understanding the problem. They were disrupting the team without a comprehensive solution.

A few years ago we supported a large company that had implemented a program to develop their sales Supervisors’ coaching skills. The thinking was simple: better coaching from sales Supervisors will lead to a more effective sales team. Mind you, this is an organization with more than 1,000 Supervisors across the US, so the investment was considerable. The training provided Supervisors with worthy coaching skills and even included follow up visits by coaches and a certification process.

The result: Supervisors were better coaches. Unfortunately, it didn’t help improve sales effectiveness.

The reason: Variables that impacted team effectiveness were not fully understood. As a result, this company tackled one aspect of the problem (supervisors weren’t prepared to help improve their teams’ skills) but did not approach the issue holistically.

To understand the problem of team effectiveness, it’s important to look at other factors that could be n play. Here’s the list of levers we consistently see as either strong value drivers (or value destroyers) when organizations are working to make their teams more effective.

• Coaching: Ensure Supervisors have the skills and the time to coach their associates frequently (for more on this read: Sales Supervisors’ Ultimate Goal has been forgotten)
• Learning: Introduce a learning program that is consistent and in place throughout the year and that makes change happen. Skills always need to be fine-tuned (for more on this read: Getting adult learning in the workplace right)
• Team culture: Understand what the culture is like, both formal and informal. See what parts of the culture to leverage or what needs to be changed. Do it through the coaching & learning levers or through a communications one (e.g., call center’s culture typically prioritizes time on the phone. This would generate push back on time off the phone for learning & coaching)
• Expectations and accountability: Ensure that every person in the organization knows exactly what is required of them. Include the need to push back on additional tasks that disrupt from their main goal. Introduce accountability as a way to support everyone in the organization to live up to their expectations and commitments. Everyone. Accountability doesn’t work well if it’s only one way. Associates need to be able to keep their Managers accountable as much as Managers need to keep them to their commitments
• Leadership engagement and modeling: Ensure senior leaders are engaged on any change initiative. On a recent engagement with a Fortune 100 company, we had the COO of the company on calls every two weeks with Sales Supervisors, Managers and VPs. That’s engagement. Engagement is also when sales Vice Presidents and Directors spend 20-30% of their time in the field. Goals are met when a team is aligned, has common objectives and when leaders are modeling the behaviors they want their teams to follow
• Metrics and goals: Ensure teams are focused on a specific and limited set of metrics. Also, make sure that the metrics don’t conflict with each other (e.g., in a sales team at a call center revenue generating units –goal is to increase and average handle time –goal is to keep down; if you want to increase the former the latter will also increase because more questions are required to probe and identify needs. Lastly, ensure that team members are absolutely clear eyed regarding the goals of each of these metrics (and that they understand what behaviors drive them)
• Reporting: Know where you stand (in terms of progress) on the main metrics in real time. This should be the priority. It is also important that you compare metrics with previous days, weeks or months and to the rest of the team’s performance. Know, overall, how you are progressing towards the monthly or quarterly goal. This is more important in positions where progress can be measured daily –or even hourly- but it’s applicable to most industries and functions
• Compensation and incentives. If it’s not aligned with the main metrics you are trying to improve, it won’t work, at least not sustainably. We recently worked with a Top 5 US wireless carrier that was trying to improve their retention rate (% of customers that called to cancel services that ended up staying with the services after the call). The main metric to compensate the team was number of calls taken. Their incentive was therefore to go through calls as fast as possible with little regard to the outcome of the call
• Product, process and systems knowledge: A foundation related to the basics of the organization is required to be used as a launching pad. Many times it’s worth reinforcing certain basic knowledge before launching the effectiveness program, in others it makes sense to include it into the learning component

In addition to looking at the variables above, it is critical that the people leading the transformation program to improve effectiveness have the right attitude. This includes things like: discipline (to work hard to achieve the goals), passion and building trust (to inspire the rest of the team, to go ‘crazy’ looking for options when things are not going well and to get the teams’ buy-in), curiosity and creativity (to be always thinking, open and trying new things to improve), listening (to ensure that you consider all perspectives and gather some great ideas), humility (to know that you and your team can always improve), resilience (to quickly get back on your feet when things are not going well), reflection and analysis (to understand the root of the issues and to study alternative solutions) and perseverance (to keep at it every day).

Summarizing

Improving the effectiveness of your teams requires:

• Coaching. It is a critical component required for any performance or effectiveness improvement initiative. That said, it is only one of the variables that will define the success of the transformation. By itself, its impact is limited
• A full understanding of the root causes that are preventing the improvement of effectiveness
• A comprehensive solution that includes, in addition to coaching, a learning program, looking at team culture, revisiting expectations and accountability, and ensuring leadership engagement and modeling is in place. Also a review of metrics and goals, reporting, compensation and incentives, and ensuring that product, process and system knowledge is at an acceptable level
• The right attitude from the team or people leading the transformation. This implementation, like any other, is not going to be without struggles and therefore requires a strong leader

What other factors are critical to improve your team's effectiveness?