1. Get a deep understanding of your reports & their career goals
Before you begin coaching your team, you have to know what their career goals are. If you start this journey without discussing goals and development, you might offer biased guidance that negatively impacts their career and well-being.
Create space for these conversations with your reports. Set up an hour with each of your team members to go over short- and long-term goals. Ask questions like:
- Where do you see yourself professionally in the next two to three years?
- Are there any big goals you’d like to accomplish? How can I help you get there?
- What is one thing you wish I knew about you or your working style?
- Do you think about your long-term career goals? What’s your dream title/industry?
- What would your ideal work routine look like in a perfect world?
After you’ve made time for these conversations, encourage direct reports to create a set of personal goals or objectives and key results (OKRs) based on your discussions. To make this easier, use Leapsome Goals, which allows you to share goals asynchronously and write notes and feedback under key results.
2. Discuss learning & development plans in your weekly 1:1s
If your company has already taken the time to design a competency framework or career progression framework for every role in the organization, then you’ve got a great starting point for creating a development plan with your direct report. Take some time to go over these frameworks consistently and use 1:1 meeting time to help solidify your employee’s progression goals and development ideas. What does that person’s career progression look like at your company? How can your organization step up to help them grow professionally?
We suggest spending time in your weekly 1:1s to dive deeper into learning and development opportunities. It’s easy to spend your 1:1 time putting out fires, but make sure to put energy into discussing what progress each team member has made with their career objectives. During the meeting, team leads should ask questions like:
- What progress have you made toward your development goals since our last meeting?
- Have you encountered any obstacles or challenges in working toward your development goals? How can I help you overcome them?
- Are there any specific skills or areas you'd like to focus on developing further?
- What resources or opportunities do you need to achieve your development goals?
- Are there any training programs, workshops, or courses you’re interested in that could help you grow professionally?
You can also advocate for leadership to make a platform like Leapsome Learning available to all employees to help them reach their development objectives. Leapsome Learning allows you to create customizable courses that are in line with your company’s competency frameworks, and team leads can even access management training within the Learning Marketplace.
3. Provide opportunities for group coaching & mentorship
Now that you know exactly where every individual member of your team wants to go and you have a plan to help them get there, you can explore group coaching — which is also a fantastic team-building opportunity, especially if you run a dispersed department.
Here are some helpful group coaching ideas to get you started:
- Weekly team brainstorming sessions where one employee shares issues and the team brainstorms solutions as a group.
- Coworking sessions where employees come together, work, and discuss issues they have in real-time.
- Sending out coaching emails or text messages to your team members based on conversations you’ve had with them. You can include insights and learnings — but of course, always be discreet and don’t share anything that a report wouldn’t want the group to know.
- Team offsites where everyone can bond, plan, and get aligned for a new quarter or year.
4. Lean into “mistakes” as opportunities to grow
Guiding reports through the experience of making missteps is one of the essential aspects of coaching team members. It’s also one of the most challenging parts of the job, especially when their mistakes or blunders impact others’ work.
When giving feedback about a recent error an employee made, it helps to follow the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) model:
- Situation — Describe the specific context or moment in which the behavior occurred.
- Behavior — Detail the behavior or actions you observed.
- Impact — Explain the impact of the behavior on you, the team, or the organization. For example, you might say, "During the last couple of team meetings (situation), I noticed that you interrupted or spoke over other team members multiple times while they were speaking (behavior). This made it difficult for the team to stay on track and disrupted the flow of the discussion (impact).”
Once the employee is aware of their own oversights, you can work together to create a system for overcoming or curbing bad work habits. This practice, as a whole, prevents a manager’s personal bias from dominating the conversation and focuses on concrete results and solutions instead.
5. Become an expert at active listening
Active listening is a non-negotiable soft skill for managers who want to identify issues within their team more readily, build engagement, and prevent turnover.
In the 2021 Harvard Business Review article How to Become a Better Listener, writers Robin Abrahams and Boris Groysberg outline three components that are required for active listening. They explain that active listeners take time to understand and process what they’re hearing, maintain calm and compassion, and show interest and a desire to understand.
To train themselves to be better active listeners and coach a team more effectively, managers should:
- Ask open-ended questions — Rather than leading team members to draw specific conclusions, encourage individuals to elaborate on their thoughts and feelings. This can help uncover deeper insights and promote a more meaningful dialogue.
- Clarify for better understanding — When discussing a difficult topic, check that you correctly understood what someone said with neutral statements. For example: “If I’m understanding you correctly, what you’re saying is [x],” and “I can imagine that would be difficult because of [x].” This shows you’re committed to approaching the conversation with empathy.
- Pay attention to nonverbal cues — Notice your direct report’s tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. Nonverbal cues can provide valuable context and help you better understand the speaker's message.
Coach team members effectively with these follow-up best practices
Ensure coaching isn’t a one-and-done situation
Managers need to be consistent about coaching a team to do it effectively, which is why it’s vital for team leads to spend time reflecting on their own improvement regularly. Create a weekly check-in with questions to set yourself up for coaching success:
- How will you coach your team members this week?
- What coaching experience has had a positive impact on your team recently?
- Which team members need a bit more motivation this week?
Run a pulse survey to ensure you’re meeting employee expectations
If you are new to coaching a team, running a quick pulse survey with your team can help you understand how to be a better leader.
In your survey, you can ask one or two open-ended questions like:
- How often do you receive coaching from me?
- How would you rate my coaching skills on a 0–10 scale?
- Can you share a time when my coaching positively or negatively impacted your work?
- Does my coaching align with your current professional goals?
- Do you enjoy the group/individual coaching you receive from me?
- What coaching experience has been your favorite?
- What can I do to help you through your issues at work? How can I be a better mentor?
Leapsome can help support your team with the right tools
The best manager-coaches take their leadership roles seriously, supporting their direct reports in their day-to-day work and helping them advance in their careers. When people in managerial positions are intentional about building their team coaching skills alongside their role-based competencies, they’re more likely to produce capable reports who make the manager’s job — and everyone’s job — easier.
Still, in the high-speed world of work, managers need the right tools to keep communication loops active and minimize teamwork issues.
As a holistic people enablement platform, Leapsome helps lighten the managerial load and improves team collaboration. Use the free Leapsome Meetings tool to collaborate on team agendas, take notes, and save action items and reminders for the future. Then, take advantage of Reviews, Goals, and Competency Frameworks to create an effective, data-centric process for employee development and growth.
Take a product tour to see how all of our features work together to optimize the coaching experience. Then see how our own global head of customer success Anja Schauer uses Leapsome to make a bigger impact in managing her team.👇
🤝 Make the team coaching experience more collaborative
Leapsome Meetings allows managers and direct reports collaborate on agendas and stay aligned on action items for development — for free.
👉 Improve your coaching with our free tool
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