How to Coach Employees to High Performance When Time is Limited

click on image to download the confidence competence model

WHEN to use it:

You can use the Let’s Grow Leaders Confidence-Competence Model every few months to keep your development efforts on track. It can serve as an important part of your overall development strategy both at an individual and team level.

Or you can use the Let’s Grow Leaders Confidence-Competence model to ground your approach in real-time as you prepare to coach employees to higher performance in a specific situation.

Coaching Employees Examples

John is headed into a sales call with a new client. You know he’s nailed similar situations before but he’s recovering from a bad “last time” scenario and his confidence is shot.

You quickly assess that he’s in the high-competence / low confidence quadrant on the model, so instead of telling him what to do (training) or pointing out areas of vulnerability (coaching), you remind him of one or two of his past success stories in similar scenes.

Up next is Jennifer, who has been knocking her sales out of the park for years, but you get a sense that she’s phoning it in these days. You know she’s confident and competent, but it’s time for a challenge.

You use your coaching conversation with her to focus on building deeper, more strategic relationships in one of her key accounts.

Coaching Employees with a Deeper Plan

Or, you can use the Let’s Grow Leader’s Confidence-Competence model to map each member of your team and identify and calibrate priorities and development needs.

We will often work with a group of managers to map and calibrate each of their employees so they can work together to support one another in developing their team members.

For example, we recently worked with an energy company to map each of their customer service agents on the Let’s Grow Leaders competence-confidence model.

Then we facilitated a conversation about what the agents in each of these quadrants needed most. For example, they asked some of their “challenge me” seasoned agents to sit side-by-side with some of the “teach me” agents to support their training efforts.

They had a long list of “encourage me” agents who were newer to their roles and just needed affirmation and recognition that what they were doing was right. So they made a plan to notice and recognize a specific set of behaviors.

They worked together for six months on this collaborative development plan and, of course, worked to ensure every agent had a specific development plan.

Then we came back together six months later and did the mapping exercise again. It was remarkable to see the improvement in most. There were also a few agents that were still in the “teach me” bucket after much additional training and effort. Some of those folks, they admitted, had been having these same challenges for years.

That led to our “Can they really get there from here?” conversation. And for a few, the answer was no. And, HR agreed to work with each of their supervisors on their final performance improvement discussions.

Coaching Employees in the Workplace