How to Coach Gaps to Lift the Performance of Your Team Members

I was sitting in a group coaching session about three weeks ago now, and one of the guys in the session is new to leading a team. He asked me, if there was one thing I was going to do to lift the performance of my team, what would I focus on with each of my team members? What we talked about was coaching the gaps, looking at where people are and what’s the one thing that you can unlock for them to lift their performance. I’m going to share with you how I explained it to him so that you can coach the gaps in your team to lift the performance of each person.

The Challenge

The person I was speaking to is a software engineer, is fairly new to leading a team, and wants to know how he can help each one of his people to lift up. What I introduced him to was this self-leading team or self-managing team model, which I’ve covered in a previous blog, but just to remember when you make that shift from being an individual contributor to a team leader, what you’ve got to reconcile is the mindset change of knowing that you can’t control everything that happens.

You can’t do it all yourself. Then once you recognise that, you realise that the shift for you is actually being able to put systems in place that increase the output of the team. In another blog, I’ve actually put together one that talks you through how to make the individual contributor to team output shift, but in this one, what I’m going to focus on is, once you’ve got the mindset and you put the systems in place, how do you focus on lifting the performance of the people around you?

Mindset and Systems

Think about your team and where they’re at currently in three areas:

1. What are their technical skills? In his, it’s an engineering, their ability to code and cut code.
2. Their business knowledge. How do they apply those technical skills in context of the organisation? How do they work with the organisation and what do they know about the organisation so that the way they do things works, all right?
3. The third is their attitude, which is how they carry themselves and the attitude about work.

If you look at those three components together, then what I want you to do for each person is to think about for each person where is the gap?

For the person that you want to coach, is the gap with their technical skills? Do they need to be actually trained on a particular capability that would help them lift their overall performance, and could you do that in the next 90 days or sooner? Is their gap a little bit of business knowledge? Is it introducing them to someone in the business that might help them understand what’s going on better, and could you coach them on a business knowledge gap? Or is there a gap attitude? The way they carry themselves, the attitude towards their work?

Summary

Think about performance, the way I look at it with this, is performance equals business knowledge times technical skills to the multiplier of someone’s attitude. If we can remove this gap, we can start to work on lifting that. Overall, we can lift the performance of those that we’re leading.

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

I typically will talk things through like the swing group coaching or coaching with leaders. We get six to eight people together, we set framework over 12 months to lift their results and systematically we help them implement frameworks like this to lift the performance of their team. If you want to talk about how that might happen in your organisation with the leaders in your organisation, let’s just have a conversation to see if there’s a good fit between what I do and where you’re at. Talk to you soon on the Reason and the Road.