Be Entrepreneur : How to Be a Coach to Your Team

How to Be a Coach to Your Team

 

It is a great wonder how life can teach us few Lessons in Business Management. All we have to do is be prepared to take the incidents of our lives and utilize it in business. If you are an entrepreneur or a team leader, this way you can learn - How to be a coach of your team.

I learned one such management lesson on a trek that I took with a group on a wonderful rainy day.

The group size was about twenty. As we started our journey, the distance between each individual was minimal. But as we started moving up and down the mountain, the distance started increasing. I along with one more person started leading the way unknowingly. At one point when we looked back, there was no one to be seen. We had left them way far behind. As we were on the right track we kept on moving ahead. Leading the way we had the time and opportunity to take a break and enjoy the natural beauty. In between a thought occurred whether we should slow down for other to catch up with us. The friend accompanying me remarked, ‘I cannot walk slow...’ It was an innocent remark, but it opened a new wave of thought in my mind. I thought that people coming behind were not slow, neither were we fast. We all were walking with our own natural speed. This was the reason slowly and steadily the gap increased between us.

I could pick this real life situation and put it in an organizational setup. An organization has various verticals and some verticals move faster than others and if each vertical is dependent on the other, suddenly the entire cycle of the organization goes haywire. This challenge can occur even in each department in a small organization. In a small organization if we take the sales department as a hypothetical case, it so happens that the sales team has to compete with each other. In some organizations even the managers have to take up their personal goals in addition to the team goal.

In such a scenario, if the manager is a star performer, he will keep on moving ahead achieving his target. In the process he will leave his team behind. Individually he may be a winner but his team has lost, his department has lost. The team does not perform as a unit and the objective of the department to work as a team is lost.

In this scenario the manager has to play a dual role – one of a coach of his team and the other of a sales person. When he sees that the gap between his personal achievements and his team’s achievements has increased, he should stop and become the coach of his team. Playing the role of a coach he should analyze what his team is doing wrong or what they are not doing right. He should then guide them in becoming more effective in their sales process. The Manager can also go and close certain calls with the team members individually and put the enrollment in his team members name so that the confidence is restored in the team. In short he should prepare a process that the team can follow.

Once the Manager is able to reduce the gap and coach them in moving ahead on their own, he can go ahead with his own individual target.

The Manager then needs to keep an eye on his team’s progress and every time the gap increases he should repeat the same process. In this manner he can win the confidence of his team, become a leader and guide the department to achieve its goals as a one united team rather than leaving his team to struggle in reaching their individual targets.

To understand this concept and derive their own interpretation, the manager can lead his team to an actual trekking expedition.

In Conclusion

If you develop a student attitude, life will become a journey of learnings and marching ahead with confidence.

Lessons from books are great. But...

Real life lessons are more effective than textbook lessons and they are for the keep for the entire life!

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