Collaborative Coaching: Changing the Mind-Set

As a manager, when you’re planning for your field rides or one-off conversations with your team, how often do these events feel like a “have to” versus a “get to”? How does your team feel? If you had an opportunity to change that mind-set to a “get to” for both parties, how would that change your overall feeling as the coaching approached?

Imagine what a change of coaching mind-set could do for your team’s engagement and productivity. Simple changes to a leader’s approach to coaching sessions and field rides would change your employees’ mind-sets from “time with their manager” to an ongoing event that would result in goal achievement and increased productivity.

Collaborative Coaching is a new approach and mind-set that you can implement to strengthen your relationship with your team. Though there are multiple components to Collaborative Coaching, here a few actions you can take to get started. You may say, “I have done, or already do, these things,” which is wonderful. But take a moment and reflect on what you do to prepare for coaching sessions to see if you do them every day. And don’t forget to include your employees in the process.

• Review past coaching session documents as prework before the session. Both you and your employee should review past coaching session documents as part of the biweekly skill analysis. You should set the expectation that they will be initiating the conversation. Ask them to share this analysis when the coaching session begins. Then look to identify which new approach they’ve tried that was based on the previous coaching session. Ask them, "What else do you feel you need to do differently?”
• Assess how their actions have impacted their business. Look to see which actions they have implemented since the last coaching session. What was the impact on business results and were they correlated to your employee’s actions? Analyze the results they’ve seen as well as the business impact. This will generate a conversation that directly connects their actions to results as opposed to just checking the box that the action was completed.
• Mutually set goals for each coaching session. What are your employee’s goals for today and how will that impact the business now and throughout the year? Set the expectation that you will spend some time at the beginning of your session together discussing such goals. This means not starting by reviewing sales numbers, who you may be visiting today, and business plans. Rather, create time for having a two-way dialogue with your employee, focusing on them—their wants for achieving their goals—and gaining insight into their thoughts. 

This is how you kick off Collaborative Coaching and start transforming the mind-set from a “have-to” to a “get-to.” By including your employee as part of the experience, they’ll feel that you’re truly there for them—and not just because you have to be. The results? Hopefully you’ll have a more positive day, there will be less pressure on both of you, and give your employees increased accountability while they focus on bettering their performance.

About the Author

Marcy Lantzy, VP Sales and Marketing

In her current role with Proficient Learning, Marcy leads the sales and marketing team to bring innovative and strategic learning and technology solutions to help sales teams and leaders in the life sciences industry achieve their goals.

She has deep industry experience on a global scale, leading and designing training, creating sales models and curriculums, working with clients to create a strategy for effective training, and driving adoption of learning solutions to change behavior in a variety of different therapeutic areas. In her previous roles, she was responsible for leading client development efforts over a wide range of training practices including specialty sales, managed markets, hospital sales, and leadership training. Marcy is an experienced facilitator, trainer, manager, and executive who has successfully helped sales professionals and managers, at every level of tenure, develop their skills and improve their effectiveness.

Three Core Building Blocks of Coaching to Implement in 2017

Midway through my selling career I had a manager who I really didn’t get along with. Let’s call him Bob. I’d been in sales for about 10 years and had experienced some success working with Fortune 500 companies selling complex solutions and services. When I changed companies, I quickly learned that my work life had changed—and not for the better. Within 3 or 4 months I found myself dreading Bob’s “coaching” calls and was often left confused about where I stood and what exactly was expected, other than “sell more.” Ironically, I was consistently at or above quota and had a track record bringing in deals when it mattered. But none of this seemed to make any difference.

As I progressed in my sales career, both as a manager and informal coach, 3 core building blocks of my coaching process emerged as the keys to helping people perform to their full ability and developing engagement.

Trust: The first and most important element of coaching is building trust. Without trust, every recommendation, suggestion, or request will be viewed with skepticism. In a coaching situation lacking trust, your team members will constantly question your motives, making it exceedingly difficult to achieve the behavior changes that improve performance. Trust is built over time in many different ways such as backing your people with internal stakeholders, supporting their professional development and career aspirations, and course correcting when they’re not getting it right.

Consistency: One of the most challenging issues we see in most sales organizations is coaching consistency. This building block actually covers 3 different issues: planned, ongoing coaching; coaching different team members consistently; and coaching individuals consistently over a period of time. Sometimes coaching opportunities can be spontaneous, but top-performing managers make coaching a priority and devote time to coach their teams in a planned, sustained way.

While many companies have developed and implemented sales competencies and behaviors, they frequently read like they were written by a room full of consultants (which is often true). As a result, these competencies and behaviors do not fulfill the promise of creating consistency and equity across teams and in individual coaching conversations. The good news here is that there are now technology platforms available (like mCoach) that enable managers to ensure coaching consistency in a much more effective and efficient way. Tools like mCoach make complex competency and behavior models functional and actually make them high-powered coaching tools that help drive performance and enable constructive dialogue about personal and professional development.

Value: Let’s face it, coaching is not a completely altruistic endeavor. Coaching is a means to an end with the end being increased performance in terms of sales, efficiency, or some other measure. Sure, in theory you get better performance out of the process, but in order for coaching to stick and pay off, the team member has to see and derive value from coaching interactions. When we talk about planning and prepping for a coaching interaction, this should be a starting point to begin thinking about what you plan to focus on, how to react and provide feedback, and to think about what you’re likely to see or hear. If you’re able to reorient the coaching session in a way that puts you in service to your team, the likelihood of delivering actual value goes up considerably.

I ended up working for Bob only about 18 months, during which time I learned a lot about the pivotal role managers play (or don’t play) in motivating and developing team members. This chapter of my sales story happily ends at a hot technology company where I took a position that was challenging, exciting, and really propelled my career forward. Take a few minutes this week to evaluate your coaching building blocks and make sure these 3 are part of your foundation.

About the Author

For over 25 years Gary Marinko has worked in a consultative capacity with Fortune 500 companies solving complex business challenges with technology. More recently Gary has combined his expertise in technology with sales training in the life sciences industry to bring focused value creation to key Proficient Learning customers. In his current role, he leads the interactive business unit at Proficient Learning, which focuses on developing sales enablement software and mobile solutions that help sales teams and managers accelerate performance and efficiency.