Leading Co-Workers to Better Outcomes
by Meera Raghunandan
4 minutes read
Yes, we all have, in a traditional office setting, helped lead our co-workers to better outcomes. Be it over coffee breaks or lunch-room discussions, most of us have been approached by our co-workers with their woes and challenges. But that’s not exactly the kind of mentorship this article is talking about today.
Today is all about how you can coach and guide your co-workers consistently to better outcomes.
A traditional coaching engagement involves enlisting a business or a leadership coach — an industry veteran and expert who can tap into a deep repository of experiences and insights — to help guide leaders who can then face their challenges better informed and better prepared. But, as you can imagine, scaling such engagements organization-wide sustainably can be quite the challenge.
At this point, many organizations turn to group coaching, where a coach (or a panel of coaches) guide a group of individuals. However, this model works well for those groups who have similar developmental needs, such as a group of first-time managers stepping into leadership roles, for example. If you’re keen on better understanding or deploying Group Coaching, I’ve penned a separate article on how you can go about it right here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/group-coaching-taking-step-towards-building-better-meera-raghunandan/
So, what about building a coaching structure for the larger organization? That’s where the coaching co-workers model comes in.
So how do you get started with coaching co-workers?
In this model, organizations build an internal coaching structure, where leaders are assigned co-workers from across different teams as coachees and help them navigate the conundrums of professional life. Typically, the assigned leaders are out of the coachee’s reporting structure, removing any hesitancy and helping them be more vocal about the challenges they face each day.
The leader can then provide an external perspective while also relying on his or her leadership experience at the organization to help co-workers tackle their challenges head-on with guidance at every step.
Such engagements have a strong potential to bring value to the entire organization, as a whole. Co-workers gain access to the guidance they need, in a warm, familiar environment. As the coach is a leader within the organization, he or she has a deeper understanding of the organizational culture, the unique challenges that come with it, and can offer more contextual guidance to the coachee.
Leaders who coach co-workers also gain tremendously from such engagements, helping them build better leadership skills, be it active listening, empathising with peers, or better assimilating their own knowledge by teaching others. The more employees get involved, the more they gain from it. Win-win, right? Not necessarily.
Limitations of guiding co-workers
Just as with everything else, this model does come with its limitations. Expert coaches spend entire careers learning how to coach others. Many a time, young leaders may not have the same wherewithal to offer the right guidance to their coachees. Or they may pass along their own biases or coloured perspectives to them, feeding into a negative cycle.
At other times, leaders may not be getting the complete picture. Through decades of experience, expert coaches can easily identify when a certain challenge is indicative of a more deeply-rooted issue and can help address it. Leaders, who would comparatively be novices at this, may not be able to replicate such analysis without sharing the same expertise.
But does that mean this isn’t the model for you?
Best of both worlds
To achieve scalable success in coaching, organizations typically employ an amalgamation of traditional coaching and coaching co-workers models. The traditional coaching engagements help leaders better themselves by introspecting into their own professional growth journey. They can then apply these leadership skills while coaching co-workers.
Ensuring there is a coach to oversee such engagements also greatly helps course-correct any challenges that may crop up, well ahead of time. They can also jump in with expert insights when a leader finds himself stymied by a particularly demanding situation. The expert coach’s external perspective on problems also greatly helps, as many a senior leader may attest!
Traditional coaching engagements bring the veracity to your workforce’s developmental journey, while coaching co-workers brings the scale. Enlisting expert coaches for every employee in the workforce can quickly become cost-and time-intensive, thus putting HR leaders off from considering it entirely. That’s where this hybrid approach to coaching comes in. The path best trodden is the one in the middle, that balances the best of both models.
If you’re keen to initiate the ‘Coaching Co-Workers’ model in your organization, but are wondering where to start, you’ve come to the right place. Drop us a line at information@mentoring-matters.com and we’ll help you not only get started, but also achieve measurable organizational success each step of the way.
While you’re here, do check out our full range of leadership solutions for your organization’s every need: https://mentoring-matters.com/solutions
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MEERA RAGHUNANDAN
Meera Raghunandan is the co-founder of Mentoring Matters, a platform for businesses and
individuals across industries to drive holistic professional growth across mid and senior-level
positions through dedicated coaching by certified professionals.