If you’ve been reading my recent posts, you know they’ve had a coaching bent to them. We’ve seen the value of coaching in the workplace and now recognize business coaching as the single most important differentiator in performance based organizations.

This is a wonderful time of year to apply your coaching skills - toward your team members, others in the workplace and yourself.

As we wind down 2016 and slide into the New Year it’s a perfect time to reflect on the past twelve months and plan for the next. As our gift to you, there’s a link at the bottom of this post giving you access to our 50-page goal setting guide. I created this guide as I was seeking to intentionally make changes in my life personally and professionally. It’s yours as our gift.

If there’s one leadership skillset that differentiates good from great organizations, it’s the ability for your managers to be coaches. That’s precisely what today’s post is about. But to get there, managers have to recognize some of the common and costly challenges that often slow them down or stop them from coaching others.

Challenge #1: Problem solving is a problem. Managers are often great problem solvers, but the problem with problem solvers is that they don’t address issues until a problem rises to a certain level and grabs their attention. Coaching is less about problem solving and more about ongoing dialogue that helps people be successful before problems arise. So when leaders don’t address issues until they become problems, they miss out on great coaching opportunities.

We all know that the annual performance review is going by the wayside. The cumbersome process leaves managers feeling drained and employees devalued. Let’s face it, this dreaded beast of a process provided little in the way of measurable results compared with the time and effort required. Even the stalwarts who set the annual review standard, such as General Electric, are changing their approach.

Here at 5.12 Solutions, we're proud of our world-class team of coaches and trainers.  We know we have a unique blend of talent that allows us to address any business challenge out there.  In the next several blogs, we will introduce our team members and share their perspective on key team and leadership issues they are seeing on the front lines of corporate America.

Leadership development is about self-development. It’s a journey and not an event. Too often we find leadership development and coaching engagements that are one-hit-wonders. They cover an overwhelming number of topics in one or two days and rarely provide ongoing reinforcement. On top of that, there’s usually no true measurement beyond the “smiley sheet” evaluations at the end of the program.

Leaders get what they expect, and they get what they tolerate.

What are you tolerating? What are the low expectations that you are “putting up with” that shouldn’t be happening?

Maybe you’re telling yourself a story that allows you to tolerate unacceptable behaviors. “Well, I don’t have the skillset on my team to backfill for this person?” Or, “I need to choose my battles.” Or “It’s no big deal.” Or, “I’ll burn the relationship if I give her feedback.” How about this one - “I can’t hold her accountable for (fill in the blank) because she’s a good producer.”

In our last blog post we announced Coachmetrix, our new leadership development coaching platform launching this month.  The response was so overwhelmingly positive that I’m inspired to share more of the story with you.  

It was three years ago that I was clear on the roadblocks that limited my leadership development programs, but I knew the solution was outside my expertise. That’s when I reached out to a good friend and web developer who patiently listened to my dream of accelerating learning and behavior change for the coachees in our leadership development programs.  Our first step was to tackle an online action planning system. Easy, right?  It was just the beginning of many starts and stops but over time we made it work and are now thrilled to have our own mobile planning and measurement tool.

Over the last two-plus years, hundreds of participants in our leadership development and coaching engagements have adopted our system. While it was seamless on the coachee’s end, it was clunky and hard to use on the backend by anyone but my team and me. I was happy to see a quote from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, “If you’re not embarrassed by your first launch, you launched too late.”  The first launch worked, but in retrospect it was embarrassing.

It was about three years ago that I recognized key issues that limited almost every leadership development program I had witnessed – programs I saw dozens of other trainers running and programs that I was running. 

As you wind down 2015 and look forward to the new year, it's a perfect time to be intentional about what you want to create for yourself personally and professionally. As a holiday gift from 5.12 Solutions, I invite you to download a complimentary copy of our Ultimate Goal Setting Guide. 

When we asked executive leaders to describe what effective senior leaders do, their responses centered around empowering people (versus micromanaging) and building others up. Here were a few of the raw comments from the executives we surveyed. 

The effective senior leader…