Meeting Employees Where They Are Today

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(By Loyd Ford) What business are you in? Are you a sales manager and your job is moving units? Are you a program director and your job is managing live talent, voice trackers and everyone else in the building along with listener relationships?

Everything you do involves coaching skills. These skills are potentially more important than they have ever been. If you are a manager, you are judged based on your skills for creating performance improvement, skills improvement and the transfer of ideas and knowledge to others to help them grow.

Coaching is the central feature in improving the direction of a business through strategy, process, execution and consistent encouragement.

The authoritarian style of leadership in past generations has given way to real leaders who can motivate employees and encourage them toward a common goal of achieving company goals.  Effective and open coaching in place of commanding employees is able to drive bottom-line results in a much more dramatic fashion. Spending time learning how to become a sharper and more engaging leader will make your employees into a powerful and effective team and create a more powerful lift to capture your goals, but done correctly it will also inspire employees to live better lives at work.

This Isn’t Spotting Great Coaching – It’s Learning To Be A Great Coach

You can rapidly spot amazing coaches in all kinds of environments, but crafting your coaching style and effectiveness into what those great coaches are doing can be much more significantly challenging.

No matter if you are talking to a new sales person you’ve just added to your team, a new morning show talent or someone that has been in these roles for years, meeting each talent where they are now is powerful. Coaching isn’t doing the same thing with each person. It’s understanding the individual, their talents and gifts and encouraging them to bring those talents to life in a meaningful way to reach the goals of their job.

Being a really great coach can mean being patient or knowing when to apply pressure to push through a sticking point. However, it is much more important to get to know the talent and let them know you.

So, how do you line up coaching conversations to match the needs of each individual talent?

Every Employee Has Reached A Different Level When You Meet Them

Being flexible and changing for the talent and situation you are in front of at any given moment is one of the best things you can become really good at in the radio business.

It will give you an edge over competitors and it will help you move employees to actions that help them soar.

If your company hires well, you will likely face five (5) different kinds of employees:

One: Newbies
You must instruct someone who really doesn’t know how to do the job yet or someone who is really just learning tasks or a role in your company. They’re new to the company, the job, their role on the team. This should require a lot more encouragement, patience and connectivity. If you’re hiring for the person (and not only people with experience), they shouldn’t stay at this level very long. Getting the right people on the bus is always a great first step.

Two: The Competitives
Once newbies come to understand and perform tasks well, they should move to being competitive (even with themselves) to achieve more, better, faster. They still require patience, but they begin to get better at systems and understanding how to do the job and they are actively working to learn how to do more work. They are contributing to the team and your job is to make them feel that and encourage them to grow in the job. You’re there to help them learn new behaviors and praise to help them when they get even better results.

Three: Performers
When these employees begin to accomplish tasks to standards, they become your performers. They are making things happen and producing results. They’re doing things correctly and now your job becomes much more than instruction. Now you put a lot more focus on recognizing good results and helping them perform better when they don’t live up to the goals you’ve set together.

Four: Champions
Some of your employees will continue to grow in their jobs and become flat-out champions. These employees are not just meeting the standards or goals effectively, they are doing this work efficiently and effectively. They’ve really become good at the job and can now begin to teach and coach others in their role. Some could even begin bringing new innovations to company roles that help the company reach goals faster, better and more economically.

Level 5: Masters
These are employees that have become the most valuable part of your team. They may become future leaders. They don’t need constant instruction. They are self-motivated and achievers who connect the dots for others. They’ve reached the championship level, but they want more. You’ll be tempted to not spend as much time recognizing their contribution or praising them, but you shouldn’t forget the secret: Everyone wants to be recognized and appreciated.

Meeting employees where they are and putting much more focus on serving them is the actual signal path to greatness.

People are really the most important assets of a company. I know people like to say it and companies today in radio may be trying to figure out how to replace all employees, but the bottom-line will always come down to innovative people who make the difference. Finding the right managers who value you, being the manager who focuses on growing those human assets will make your career explode to true greatness.

Meet employees where they are, focus on serving them and using patience, empathy and encouragement to help them grow. Learn how to build championships and create masters. This will make you one of the great coaches people talk about in your company and in the broadcast industry.

Loyd Ford consults radio stations, coaches personalities, and provides behavioral and strategic programming to radio with RPC. Reach him anytime. 864.448.4169 or [email protected].

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