'Coaching' the Coach
At a time when training and overall employee moral requires the biggest boost, it seemed more than fitting that the CMA Contact Centre Council recently held a “Coach the Coach” session. It was clear from a room full of engaged attendees that many companies still see the value in ensuring that their leaders and managers have a fundamental understanding of the importance of “coaching” within their respective organizations.
Three industry experts presented at this event (Winston Siegel, Switchgear Consulting, Kim Chernecki, Fusion Learning and Terry Pruner, Seneca College) and all participants came away with a more structured understanding of the differences between, managing, coaching and leadership.
Today it is simply not enough to manage or to lead...coaching is an essential part of the development process and will enable some of your best to truly shine. It is a unique art that is being better understood and more broadly embraced than in times past. Solid listening skills, one-on-one meetings and the enhancement of a skill were all promoted as vital ingredients to becoming a good coach.
The session, which began with understanding what it means to be a true “coach”, then evolved into what types of tasks a good coach would engage in and ended with an educational approach to how one may learn to understand the fundamentals of leadership within a contact centre environment. There were also some key thoughts shared around how one might identify a learning organization and what key contributors are evident in such an organization. Recruiting and hiring for values, recognizing and rewarding behaviours and identifying with effective mechanisms that are in place to identify barriers to the learning process were all mentioned as key criteria to support a learning organization.
Fundamentally, we all took away the clear message that what you are doing is not the question; it is all about how you are doing what you are doing that makes the biggest difference and the most significant impact. To that end, Winston Siegel left all minds running in high gear with the thought that “if no SKILL has improved, no COACHING has actually taken place.”
