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Coaching roles to support the employee experience: the coachee’s lens

Last month, I discussed the importance of creating an employee experience that is inspiring.  We want people to have an emotional connection to the company they work for.  A connection with both their mind and their heart.  If we can achieve that, we will entice talent to join and to stay, because they are in a place they love working and are doing work they love to do.  And to do so, we need to look at their experience through their eyes, not our own HR view, and offer them support where they are, not where we think they are.

So we are moving away from an HR life cycle view of the working world, towards an employee experience view of the workplace.  How can we ensure that the employee has the experience that will engage them in what they love doing, what they are good at and what the organisation needs to achieve?  That should be the question that is top of our mind.  Employee Engagement 3.0 if you like.

Each week, I will write a post about one transition point in an employee’s career.  I will look at what they want from their work and career at that stage in their career, what the company wants from them; and how coaching can support them to achieve that – whether that’s with an external coach, an internal coach, a manager as coach.  In some cases, we’ll also look at the buddy as coach/mentor.

What kind of coaching will best support the employee’s experience?

But how do you know whether to engage an external coach, an internal coach, manager as coach or buddy?

The answer to that question is simple and complex in equal measure.

Coaching with your manager

The simple answer is that if the employee can talk completely candidly with their manager and has total trust in that person, to discuss their needs and desires around their career decisions (which are also linked to life decisions, so that’s a factor too), then great…that’s where the conversation happens.

One of the major obstacles to talking with your manager is that they are also responsible for your performance assessment; and they have a vested interest, if you are good, in keeping you in the team, so they don’t have the hassle of back-filling your position.  There is a power dynamic that must not be overlooked here, where the supervisor has more power than the supervisee, which is not the equal partnership needed for coaching.  If the employee trusts the manager to put the employee’s needs ahead of the business needs, then coaching can work.  But if the employee feels that their manager will put their own needs and those of the business first, career coaching  won’t work.  Performance coaching may be more realistic, that is helping the person to perform better in this role or getting ready for a promotion.

Coaching with an internal executive coach

So, if the employee feels for whatever reason that he/she cannot be completely truthful with their manager, then they may choose to work with an internal coach, someone who is independent of the performance management process, and unbiased about any choices the employee may decide to make in or outside of the organisation.

Coaching with an external executive coach

If the employee doesn’t want that discussion with someone internally, then the option is to use an external coach.  This may be personal information that they don’t want to share with a fellow employee, or it may be strategic business information that they feel they can’t share with an employee. The larger the organisation, and the greater the distance in departments between the internal coach and the employee, the less likely this is to be an issue.  But it’s really the employee’s call.  If they don’t feel they can be totally transparent, for whatever reason, then an external coach is a better fit for them.

Sound reasonable?  It is, but it’s not always easy to predict what might come up in conversation that the employee might not want to share with their manager or an internal coach further down the line.  That’s where it gets complex.

Quality coaching is all about the ability to be transparent

There are others reasons for making this choice, such as cost, but as with any business decision, quality of the experience must be part of the equation as well, and in the case of coaching, good quality coaching comes from trust in the relationship (Erik De Haan).

What’s your experience of this?

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