What is Employee Coaching?  Employee coaching is an instrument for systematic guiding and counseling subordinates or colleagues with a view to achieving personal professional development overtime, in a project or organization. The subject matter of coaching may include improving the capacity of coached in terms of analysis of relevant problems and formulating alternate suggestions for solutions.  Successful employee coaching  promote mutual interactions between coach and the coached aiming at improving quality of thinking,  efficient performance, effective interpersonal relationship and team spirit.

Effective Coaching serves as a promoter of certain specific objectives as follows;

  1. Coaching stimulates the changing behavior of the coached as against the supervisory (bossing) way of dealing with the subordinates.
  2. Coaching leads to a sustained positive work relationship as opposed to instructional or directive nature of dealing with the coached.
  3. Coaching is based on improving the personal professional skills of coached and is built on mutual respect.

Skills  for a  Coach

Major skills as necessary for a coach include the following:

  1. Function as Mentor-the coach inspires and motivates the employees to enhance committeemen towards organization’s values, missions and objectives.
  2. Function as Counselor-the coach provides better understanding about the roles and responsibilities of the employees towards contributing effectively for achieving organizational objectives and goals.
  3. Function as a teacher/facilitator- the coach works with the employees to find out and analyze problems and teaches/facilitates developing competencies to solve problems by their own. The Coach also stimulates questions and answers sessions as well as sharing of experiences and feedback sessions with the employees to promote generate logical thinking and its application by the employees.
  4. Function as Communicator-the coach should possess effective communication skills in terms of different basic communication types including listening, feedback, sharing of experiences, non-verbal communication and interpersonal communication
  5. Coaching serves as a project management tool. The project manager can use this tool to improve the employees motivation and committeemen towards his responsibilities.