TL;DR: Effective coaching is the secret to building a successful team of people who know how to solve problems, work independently, and advocate for themselves. Still, learning to balance the coaching and managerial aspects of a leadership position has its challenges, especially since today’s team leads report feeling less skilled at their jobs than in previous years. Feeling underdeveloped and overworked, many managers struggle with delegating work and entrusting team members with more responsibility, not allowing reports to take ownership of their own career development. This playbook offers concrete steps to help team leads build a thriving team with great leadership strategies at the helm.
As champions of the company culture and mission, great managers are the linchpins of every thriving organization — and their ability to coach a team is only getting more important. Before the pandemic, just 23% of employees wanted more support from their managers, while an impressive 77% of team members are asking for it today. (1)
The difficulty is that today’s managers don’t feel as equipped as they need to as coaches and mentors. Only 48% of team leads say they have the skills they need to be exceptional in their roles, which shows that many businesses don’t prioritize leadership development, even though companies investing in manager enablement experience 47% lower turnover, 17% higher productivity, and 81% lower absenteeism. (2)
When it comes to coaching team members, we need to stop expecting managers to learn entirely on the job and start giving them the centralized training assets they need to steer team members along the right path.
We created this playbook as a go-to resource that managers and leaders can rely on to improve their coaching skills and offer the support their direct reports need. With concrete steps and best practices, we encourage you to share it widely with department leads and aspiring managers throughout your organization.
⚡ Empowered managers translate to more energized teams
Leapsome Meetings syncs with Goals and Reviews, giving team leads the right tools and data to support their reports effectively.
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“The leadership playbook has undergone a significant rewrite,” writes Magnet Culture's President and Chief Retention Officer Cara Silletto on LinkedIn. “Today’s managers still require tools like effective communication, resilience, and savvy onboarding techniques. However, deeper insights into emotional intelligence, up-to-date generational dynamics, and feedback mechanisms are also a necessity. It’s not just about addressing gaps — it’s about equipping our leaders for tomorrow’s challenges.
Indeed, the role of the manager has grown to encompass more responsibilities than it did in the past. According to our Workforce Trends Report, three in four employees would like to receive more feedback and recognition from their team leads. At the same time, 79% of team leads say they’re at risk of burnout from the stress of managing people. This is likely because even the most effective managers don’t have the tools they need to incorporate more coaching within the regular flow of their work.
The best manager-mentors start by getting to know their team members deeply and learning what professional goals and projects motivate their reports the most. Then, they build solid plans for growth, revisiting them throughout the performance management cycle in meetings, performance reviews, and asynchronous discussions.
Use this playbook if you notice engagement numbers declining or if you’ve received feedback from team members that they’re looking for more guidance from their team leads.
You should also use it if your company has just undergone a restructuring or massive growth and you’re looking to promote more employees from within and equip new managers with the resources they need to support their direct reports.
To coach a team well, you need a systematic approach to help employees set and track their development goals. A tool like Leapsome Goals leverages AI so you can create goals quickly and adjust them so they align with overall company objectives.
Competency frameworks create a clear professional roadmap for every role within your organization, highlighting the skills every employee needs to excel in before getting a promotion. As long as everyone has access to them, they can simplify coaching team members because they keep everyone on the same page about possible career paths within the company.
We know that more team members want feedback from their managers, yet 77% of respondents to our 2023 State of People Enablement Report rated their company’s performance review processes as “bad.”
A solid performance management (PM) system isn’t about holding employees accountable — it’s about showing them when they’re on the right path with their career goals and helping them create an action plan for improvement when they’ve gone off track. Thankfully, Leapsome Reviews has the templates, automations, and analytics you need to create a powerful, development-oriented PM system.
Before you begin coaching your team, you have to know what their career goals are. If you start this journey without discussing goals and development, you might offer biased guidance that negatively impacts their career and well-being.
Create space for these conversations with your reports. Set up an hour with each of your team members to go over short- and long-term goals. Ask questions like:
After you’ve made time for these conversations, encourage direct reports to create a set of personal goals or objectives and key results (OKRs) based on your discussions. To make this easier, use Leapsome Goals, which allows you to share goals asynchronously and write notes and feedback under key results.
If your company has already taken the time to design a competency framework or career progression framework for every role in the organization, then you’ve got a great starting point for creating a development plan with your direct report. Take some time to go over these frameworks consistently and use 1:1 meeting time to help solidify your employee’s progression goals and development ideas. What does that person’s career progression look like at your company? How can your organization step up to help them grow professionally?
We suggest spending time in your weekly 1:1s to dive deeper into learning and development opportunities. It’s easy to spend your 1:1 time putting out fires, but make sure to put energy into discussing what progress each team member has made with their career objectives. During the meeting, team leads should ask questions like:
You can also advocate for leadership to make a platform like Leapsome Learning available to all employees to help them reach their development objectives. Leapsome Learning allows you to create customizable courses that are in line with your company’s competency frameworks, and team leads can even access management training within the Learning Marketplace.
Now that you know exactly where every individual member of your team wants to go and you have a plan to help them get there, you can explore group coaching — which is also a fantastic team-building opportunity, especially if you run a dispersed department.
Here are some helpful group coaching ideas to get you started:
Guiding reports through the experience of making missteps is one of the essential aspects of coaching team members. It’s also one of the most challenging parts of the job, especially when their mistakes or blunders impact others’ work.
When giving feedback about a recent error an employee made, it helps to follow the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) model:
Once the employee is aware of their own oversights, you can work together to create a system for overcoming or curbing bad work habits. This practice, as a whole, prevents a manager’s personal bias from dominating the conversation and focuses on concrete results and solutions instead.
Active listening is a non-negotiable soft skill for managers who want to identify issues within their team more readily, build engagement, and prevent turnover.
In the 2021 Harvard Business Review article How to Become a Better Listener, writers Robin Abrahams and Boris Groysberg outline three components that are required for active listening. They explain that active listeners take time to understand and process what they’re hearing, maintain calm and compassion, and show interest and a desire to understand.
To train themselves to be better active listeners and coach a team more effectively, managers should:
Managers need to be consistent about coaching a team to do it effectively, which is why it’s vital for team leads to spend time reflecting on their own improvement regularly. Create a weekly check-in with questions to set yourself up for coaching success:
If you are new to coaching a team, running a quick pulse survey with your team can help you understand how to be a better leader.
In your survey, you can ask one or two open-ended questions like:
The best manager-coaches take their leadership roles seriously, supporting their direct reports in their day-to-day work and helping them advance in their careers. When people in managerial positions are intentional about building their team coaching skills alongside their role-based competencies, they’re more likely to produce capable reports who make the manager’s job — and everyone’s job — easier.
Still, in the high-speed world of work, managers need the right tools to keep communication loops active and minimize teamwork issues.
As a holistic people enablement platform, Leapsome helps lighten the managerial load and improves team collaboration. Use the Leapsome Meetings tool to collaborate on team agendas, take notes, and save action items and reminders for the future. Then, take advantage of Reviews, Goals, and Competency Frameworks to create an effective, data-centric process for employee development and growth.
Take a product tour to see how all of our features work together to optimize the coaching experience. Then see how our own global head of customer success Anja Schauer uses Leapsome to make a bigger impact in managing her team.👇
🤝 Make the team coaching experience more collaborative
Leapsome Meetings allows managers and direct reports collaborate on agendas and stay aligned on action items for development.
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Today’s managers should coach their teams because employee development is essential to their role, and highly competent teams tend to improve the work experience for everyone.
The manager’s job isn’t just about ensuring that team members fulfill their daily responsibilities and follow company policies. It’s also about helping them grow as professionals and live out company values so they can advance within the organization and achieve their career goals.
Getting someone to enjoy their work can be one of the most challenging tasks for a manager.
First, determine if that person’s demotivation is a fixable issue. Would streamlining their job help bring the excitement back? Are they dealing with a personal issue that’s bleeding into their work? Or is it a structural problem that you can raise with company management and push for improvement? Understanding what is demotivating them can help you build a plan to address the issue.
After you’ve done the clarity work, help your report get their motivation back. Try some ideas like:
Many qualities make an effective coach at work. While being a great coach does require some innate talent, there are a few qualities you can hone over your time as a people ops leader:
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