When Coaching becomes the Need at the workplace

Posted on January 02, 2021 by Anitha Bakhtani, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

When I first got appointed to a leadership role, I was elated – since this was the first big milestone of my career. As this was a dream-come-true, I took a deep plunge into learning the ways of becoming an effective and successful leader on my career growth journey. At that time, I felt that the only area I needed to focus on learning was people management (as I had already excelled as a star performer in my individual contributor roles until then, which had got me my coveted leadership role as a career growth opportunity).

With this understanding, I invested time and energy in learning different ways of effectively leading people in an inspirational manner and equipped myself with methodologies, tools and frameworks on authentic leadership with a people development focus. Over the years, consistent application of my learnings started to get me progressively comfortable with leading effectively, thus building my confidence.

While this journey, over a period of time, took me through different phases of identifying and hiring the best talent on my teams, ensuring my team members remained engaged and motivated and the team’s efforts were always channelized towards performance excellence, I learnt very soon that there was no one-size-fits all when it came to employee development. It was never enough to hire the best and mentor them to deliver their best performance – I started to realize with experience that developing people was always a ‘work-in-progress’ on a ‘continuous improvement focus’ for me as a leader.

While the conventional methods of mentoring my team members on-the-job to provide them exposure to opportunities for developing new competencies or sending them to online / classroom trainings had their place, I encountered several situations along my leadership career, where none of these could really help much.

It was at this stage that I decided to go deeper into understanding where the knowledge and skills I had gained, applied and refined were falling short. This endeavor compelled me to begin with listing out the situations I had experienced or observed with either members of my own team or those of my peer leaders, where the conventional development methods were clearly not yielding the desired results.

Listing out the situations was by itself an interesting exercise since I realized that there was many common situations experienced not only by myself but also by my peers. A distilled shortlist turned out to be as follows:

Competent team members going to their leaders for solutions for newly encountered situations or those where they hadn’t experienced great success in the past.
A team member feeling content with his / her performance and results and not open to be pushed for greater achievements.
Some team members finding it challenging to deal with emotionally complex / charged situations or stress
At times, a team member saying ‘YES’ but not doing it after
Well-designed development plans remaining on paper, with not much progress in implementation
Team members who chose to be cynical or skeptical more often than one would expect or not learning lessons from past mistakes (Fixed vs. Growth mindset)
Team members wanting ‘growth’ but not aware of what they really wanted or how this should like look
Soft-skill trainings attended by team members – not necessarily showing the expected changes consistently
Relationship or collaborations issues within or outside of the team
Talented employees hitting a plateau – becoming unsure of their own potential
Good performers losing motivation at certain points
Less than optimal alignment with the organization’s culture and values

This search brought me to the forefront of the need to go ‘below the waterline’ of the iceberg in order to sustain my focus on employee development – i.e. mindsets, attitudes, behaviors, values, beliefs, etc.

Here was my calling to explore the world of coaching and how I, as a leader, could benefit from this tool for developing my team members.