How to Effectively Coach Your Team

While instructing "Leadership, Team-Building & Coaching Skills" public seminars for Pryor Learning Solutions this month in Pennsylvania, I heard a lot of attendee frustration on how to work with "problem" team members effectively. In this class, we discuss assessing team members' skills and attitude to determine how to coach individuals to capitalize on their strengths and develop their weaknesses within the team.

We re-framed the conversation to how leaders can coach teams to benefit from diversity in team members' perspectives and work through conflict, thereby producing better results as a team than could be obtained individually.

The four methods of leadership coaching that we discussed are:

- Relating to team members who have high skills, but poor attitude, to develop positive attitude to contribute to the team productivity.

- Training high-attitude and low-skilled team members to develop their skills, possibly paired to learn from high-skill team members that the leader is relational coaching.

- Counseling team members with low skills and attitude to determine how to address their training, personal and organizational issues making them a "problem" player.

- Mentoring team members with high skills and attitude to keep them motivated and empower them to develop into future leaders.

Effective team member coaching is the key to building a synergistic and highly-productive team. Leaders who understand what motivates each team member can effectively match individual goals with team and organizational goals. Contact us for training and consultation to develop your coaching skills and maximize your team's productivity.