Becoming a leader who uses a coaching style of leadership can be developed overtime using just four skill sets.

Each leader may have different challenges to incorporate these skills In their approach to leading and managing employees.

That is why it’s important for each leader to know themselves and understand their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to various aspects of leading,  managing.and coaching employees.

In a previous article and video I talked about the importance of learning active listening as a highly important skill for coaching employees.

Another skill is asking questions and this ties in very well with active listening. In order to use active listening you need to have people express what’s on their mind and sometimes that’s more than what’s on the surface.

Asking questions allows you to understand the person, What they are experiencing and how they’re feeling. it can be used in every interaction with an employee when it comes to coaching them and for employee development.

The more you understand what someone is experiencing and how they’re feeling the better you can guide and coach them. Asking questions is a way to facilitate that process.

Coaching is best done through regularly scheduled coaching sessions as it is a different conversation than what typically happens when managing activities on a daily basis.

Coaching is about helping the person grow and this related to their performance on the job as when people develop themselves their performance improves, they feel more productive and you and the organization benefits from their ability to perform better.

When asking questions use open ended questions unless you are seeking a factual response. This could be questions like:

• How are you feeling about the job these days?
• What challenges do you face to meet your responsibilities and tasks?
• How can I better support you?
• What on the job problems do you have that feel frustrating?
• How do you see your career path?

These types of questions helps you to understand where the person stands with their employment and where they want to go. This can help with employee retention as you might discover an employee who is thinking of leaving or feeling held back.

Of course the questions could be more directly related to the job such as, how is the project your working on going from your perspective? How are you feeling about working with the team? What would you change if you could?

Combining asking questions with active listening are essential coaching skills that every leader who wants to adapt a coaching style of leadership needs to develop. This takes awareness of personal challenges in doing so and working on improving these skills consistently over time.

I have a video demonstrating active listening, so check that out, and there is also an active listening exercise you can download from my website.