How to Use Leaderboards for Business Coaching

What is Coaching?

There is a lot of confusion in organizations about the difference between managing, training and coaching employees. The key focus of leadership and leading people in any organization is about performance.In order to maximise the impact of managing, training or coaching on employee performance it’s important not to mash them up when dealing with staff. Let me explain.

1. Managing: is all about solving the problem. This is a more directive approach with the manager telling the employee what to do next.
2. Training: imparts specific skills or new knowledge. You train people to learn a new process or task, something they haven’t done before.
3. Coaching: is a facilitated approach to guide the employee to find the answer for themselves. It’s about raising their self awareness of the need to do something different and pursuing a course of action.

To Coach or not to Coach?

That is the question. Is coaching an important part of employee management? What happens if you fail to coach your team members? The answer is; they fail to learn new skills, they do not improve their performance and they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. The bottom line is that the “bottom line”, sales performance and company results, suffer. If you are not coaching your team, this article is for you. Recent research found that 73% of managers spend less than 5% of their time coaching their teams. Coaching takes two paths, firstly to coach for better results right now and secondly to coach for skills that will improve the persons overall work proficiency. Increasing the time spent coaching will have a multiplier effect in results delivered by employees who now feel valued and supported to be more successful.

Using your CRM to Coach

Whatever CRM you use, it will hold valuable information about a range of tasks, activities, performance and outcomes. For many managers the key problem is accessing the right information, at the right time to coach an individual when it will have the most relevance and impact.  Managers often find themselves constantly refreshing report data to get an up to date picture of employee performance. This might be around activities they have completed today or the progress against their important company targets. A leaderboard that is continually updating when new activity data is available takes away any manual intervention and allows the manager to focus on where they can best spend their time and effort with individual employees. The leaderboard can show an employees status against their daily activities and allows the manager to see how each person is performing as an individual as well as comparative to their colleagues. This knowledge makes an intervention with the employee more meaningful and allows the manager to chose the right intervention strategy, managing, training or coaching.

How Does Spinify Help?

Spinify provides leaderboards that access popular data and CRM apps. Setup takes minutes and connects the data, users and the metrics so that you can start seeing employee performance results and identify any issues that require intervention. Once set up the leaderboards run automatically. No further admin is required.

Leaderboards need to be uncluttered and easy to see, even from the back of the room. Managers have the opportunity to see what’s happening and how staff are performing without being right up in their face. They can them chose the appropriate time and action for each team member.  Moreover they can celebrate milestones and wins with individuals and the team. A recognition culture is incredible important to engage and motivate employees.

Conclusion

Performance is at the core to any managing or coaching interaction. Every organization is looking for more clarity on communicating performance needs to their employees. Driving performance and change through coaching and management of employees requires a fair amount of rigor on the part of the leader to communicate frequently, define clear goals and set proper expectations. Spinify recently released the Performance Grid that allows you to easily relate leaderboards to performance.

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