How to build your team using mentoring and coaching

In order to expand the capabilities of everyone on your team, you will need to share the knowledge and wisdom that you as an experienced leader have gained along the way. In other words, you will need to be a coach to your employees.

In the much praised 2002 book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan describe coaching as “the difference between giving orders and teaching people how to get things done,” and that good leaders “regard every encounter as an opportunity to coach.”

With that in mind, here are some of the suggestions on how to effectively coach your team:

• Observe the person(s) work and provide them with specific and meaningful feedback related to their performance. Discuss both the strong and weak points of the employee’s performance.
  
  
• Be willing to discuss broad organizational issues in a group setting so that everyone can learn and contribute. By discussing these issues collectively, you instill trust and confidence in your team and you will give everyone the opportunity to learn and to grow.
  
  
• When it comes to asking questions, don’t hold back. By tactfully asking your employees questions related to problems and issues that you may not have a complete grasp on, you will help people rethink these problems and search for new ways of looking at them. The authors Bossidy and Charan state that as a leader, you should ask pertinent questions in order to “expose weaknesses in the strategy that would have made it a certain failure in execution.”
  
  
• Offer your employees education and training. When it comes to expanding the capabilities of your employees, this suggestion is perhaps the most obvious of them all; yet, it isn’t always carried through properly. Instead of sending people on generic, broad-based training courses, you should recognize the unique skills and existing capabilities of your employees (segment them, if you will) and individually discuss future opportunities for training and growth with them.
  

By simply managing the people on your team effectively you give your team an opportunity to achieve its objectives. But, when you also use coaching and mentoring to lead your team, you not only provide your team to succeed now, but you also build up your team’s capabilities, and just as importantly, you also expand the capabilities of your entire organization.

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The 12 steps to team building

Susan M. Heathfield has written an article over at About.com called "How to make teams effective" in which she outlines the ways in which proper team-building can take place. From the article:

"In a team-oriented environment, you contribute to the overall success of the organization. You work with fellow members of the organization to produce these results. Even though you have a specific job function and you belong to a specific department, you are unified with other organization members to accomplish the overall objectives. The bigger picture drives your actions; your function exists to serve the bigger picture."

Heathfield states that the steps for true team-building can be broken down into twelve C's. Among them are:

• (Setting) Clear Expectations
• (Demonstrating) Context
• (Demonstrating) Commitment
  
• (Having) Competence
• (Having a) Charter
• (Exhibiting) Control
  

All in all, this is an interesting article on how to truly develop an effective team. Read the full article here.

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