Are you familiar with the saying “people leave managers, not companies”? Having competitive salaries and perks is important, but money is not everything. Additionally, it is essential to think not only about keeping your employees in post but also about keeping them happy and engaged. This is where a coaching leadership style can help you reduce your turnover and increase long-term employee satisfaction and engagement.

What are the main reasons for people leaving their jobs?

42% of respondents to the IIP survey stated that having a bad boss was their primary reason for leaving their job.

According to a survey conducted by Investors in People (IPP), the main reasons for people leaving their jobs in 2023, after money, are management, being valued, career progression, and working hours. 

Check out our article about how poor managers can hurt your team morale.

Consider factors in your organisation that could be adversely affecting staff retention rates – these might not be immediately obvious but employee engagement survey results can be one way of identifying priorities or pinch-points for organisational culture.

What is a coaching leadership style?

A coaching leadership style is centred around people and their needs, and when done well, can help people feel more satisfied, engaged and connected to the organisation and the team.

This leadership approach aims to bring the best out in teams by guiding them through goals and challenges. The ultimate purpose is to develop people and create a continuous learning environment. In leadership terms, a coaching leader would also act often as a mentor or guide to individuals, Offering guidance and support when needed. 

Sir John Whitmore described it as “A coaching style of leadership requires that you connect at the human level, beyond the task and stop thinking that the leader is “the expert” who has to tell everyone the best way to do things. Coaching is based on trust, belief and non-judgement.” 

A coaching leadership style generates awareness and responsibility in people: 

*The benefits of a coaching leadership style (source: Coaching for Performance book)

There are many skills we can work on in order to become better leaders. Fortunately, studies have shown that managers can improve their coaching skills in as little as 15 hours, provided they’re prepared to invest in how to learn to coach in the first place. 

For a coaching leadership style, there are two skills that are essential. The first one is the ability to ask great questions. Coaching is about self-reflection, and this is something only we can do, we cannot be told to change our behaviours, we need to go on this journey ourselves. 

Read more about “how to use questions to empower your team”  here.

The second skill is active listening. Actively listening to someone instead of just waiting to respond is one of the most effective ways to understand your employees but also to make them feel valued and appreciated. 

You can learn more about active listening here. 

How can you use a coaching leadership style to reduce employee turnover?

Using a coaching leadership style is about helping people with self-reflection and allowing them to come up with their own answers. By asking questions that seek to understand your team and actively listening to their view of the world, you can help them find their own purpose but also align it to the purpose of the organisation. 

You also need to help people recognise the value they bring to the organisation and encourage them to bring the best version of themselves to their job. When we are too involved in our day-to-day tasks this can be challenging, a classic case of not being able to see the wood for the trees. As a leader, you have the responsibility to help them see their positive impact on the organisation, which will help people feel more involved and valued. 

An important part of a coaching leadership style is recognising we don’t have all the answers. This knowledge will help you avoid micromanaging and instead encourage people to find the answers for themselves. This will in turn encourage autonomy and ownership. Allowing people to come up with their own ideas, projects and new ways of working, will encourage them to take responsibility. 

Ultimately, a leader/coach facilitates conversations: using meetings, team away days and 1-1s not only to discuss operational stuff but also to gain a deeper understanding of your team and enhance trust. Knowing your team and their individual needs can help you find the right flexibility and motivation that people need to feel happy and engaged with their jobs. 

Check our article about how to optimise performance reviews here.

The Optimist View…

Ultimately, we all want to feel valued, be part of a team, and feel we contribute to a bigger purpose. And this is where a coaching leadership style can help your organisation. 

It changes the dynamics from telling or dictating to a more collaborative and empowered environment where people feel safe to speak up and share their ideas, which will, no doubt, encourage them to take more responsibility. 

At Optimist Performance, we work with leaders to help them develop the necessary skills to become even better leaders. As we said before, no one has all the answers, and coaching is about continuous learning. This is what we are passionate about, helping leaders become their best selves to in turn get the most out of their teams and ensure their organisation goes from strength to strength.

If you want to take your and your team’s leadership skills to the next level, get in touch with us.

The post Can your leadership style help reduce employee turnover? – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

In my experience, performance reviews have fallen into something that it’s more of a tick-box exercise for the organisation and more often than not, they are too corporate-oriented. Even the phrase “performance review”  has for me, and I’m sure for other people, a negative connotation, which can create a cultural hangover within organisations and teams around the use of them. 

Is there a better way for performance reviews?

That said, I think there is a better way to carry out performance reviews and as Simon Sinek would say, it starts with WHY. Why do we do performance reviews and what are we trying to achieve? 

For me, performance reviews should be aligned with Individual Development Plans within organisations. They should be colleague-oriented. 

A great example would be sports where the performance reviews focus on individual development and the daily, weekly, and monthly, “process” of getting better, rather than the outcome of competition (winning/losing a game) and there is a lot that corporate organisations could learn from it. 

How can we make performance reviews more effective?

Start with company culture

Many of the challenges of performance reviews could be solved with a positive company culture. A culture that puts people at the centre of the organisation. 

Do we really understand what the person on the receiving end of the performance review wants or needs out of it? Do we know what the best way would be for them to do it? Even more important, are we falling into the trap of creating a process that only serves certain people? 

As a senior leader, I have experienced first-hand how ineffective processes are when they aren’t designed with you in mind. So, for me, it’s critical to reinvent performance reviews in a more inclusive and diverse way. Create processes with diversity in mind and for that, you need to include everyone in the creation process. 

Keep your company values in mind

When we talk about culture, we can’t forget about company values. What are the values that we want to live by and how are we living them day in and day out? 

I’ve seen many performance reviews where values were nowhere to be found. Keeping your company values in mind would ensure that the demonstration of these values is assessed in performance reviews, considering we’re looking at them as part of IDPs. 

Making them the norm, not the exception

Assuming that we can cover a person’s performance for the last 12 months in an hour session is unrealistic and it creates more problems than it solves. 

However, they can be a time for reflection and celebration (what has gone well, where can we keep growing).

The fundamental part in my opinion is to make performance reviews an ongoing organic process across the year. Create an environment where people feel safe to speak up, receive and give feedback and have challenging conversations more often, instead of holding up until the end of the year, where more often than not, it’s already too late. 

This is also linked to values, if you see someone whose behaviours don’t align with the company values, waiting till the end of the year is not doing that person or the organisation any favours. Creating an environment where you can give feedback on these things when they happen, allows the person to reflect and think back and hopefully, act differently in the future. 

Develop leadership skills

There are probably only a small number of people who were born great leaders. But this doesn’t mean we cannot learn to become one. Providing training that helps people develop their leadership skills is a crucial aspect of more effective performance reviews. 

Using a coaching leadership style for example can be a great way to make the most of performance reviews. Knowing what the right questions to ask are, being more empathetic, and improving your listening skills, are just some of the few things that great leaders should continuously work on. 

Use a holistic approach

Gathering authentic and objective feedback is always a challenge for executives and larger organisations. However, as leaders, we should always strive for the most real overview possible. 

To gain this understanding, I think it’s necessary to make performance reviews a 360 process where not only managers get to review their teams, but the teams get to review their managers too. 

Fortunately, there are many possibilities to do this, I have seen few options in the past that seem to work well. 

• The goldfish ball activity: where the whole team takes turns to sit in a chair in the centre of a circle and receive feedback (both positive and constructive) from every person in the team. 
• Gathering feedback from different avenues: as part of someone’s review, that person is tasked with gathering 5-10 feedbacks or reviews from different people they work with. This can even include clients or people in different teams that they have worked closely with. 

Using methods like these, allows leaders to gain a more realistic view of someone’s performance, and helps to avoid someone’s biases or opinions of the person being reviewed.

Create accountability for everyone

Performance reviews have a focus on accountability for the employee, but what about the organisation? 

Going back to my previous point about making them part of the individual development plan, we could use these reviews as an opportunity for every member of the team to communicate what they need from the organisation to continue their growth. 

For example, let’s say someone needs to improve their sales skills, how can the organisation contribute to it? Is it more training, or is it more help or support from a manager or a colleague? Whatever that is, the review process should be a two-way conversation where both the employee and the organisation are held accountable for the employee growth and therefore, the outcomes. 

Take action

I previously mentioned that performance reviews have been in my experience a tick-box exercise, and following up from the accountability point above, I think action is a must if we want to make performance reviews more effective within our organisations. 

Continuing with the previous example, what is the organisation doing after hearing what the employee needs? Taking action proves that you are a people-centred organisation and will impact your employees’ engagement and satisfaction, with in turn, will help retention. 

On the contrary, not taking action, will communicate to everyone in your organisation that what they say doesn’t matter, and disempower them to speak up in the future. And this is a really dangerous place to be. 

Be agile and adapt

Creating new processes is not easy, which is why being able to adapt is crucial to success. I believe there is a better way but I’m also aware of the challenges when creating something new. 

So, when thinking about how to change and make performance reviews more effective, we need to plan for reviewing the process and making changes until we get it right. And even then, times changes and we need to continuously adapt to new realities, so making sure we have an internal review process of the process is an important element towards success. 

File for divorce

It’s not uncommon to link performance reviews to promotions and pay rises, which first, re-directs the objective of the process and secondly, it creates a great deal of stress both for the team members and the leaders. 

But we can divorce the two. Having conversations about promotions and pay rises is essential, but we can find a more appropriate time for them. This will allow us to keep our reviews focused on individual development and growth. 

Be aware of feelings

Any situation or experience will generate an emotional response and it will be different for each of us. While it is impossible to prevent these emotional reactions, we can make sure we do our best to ensure they are positive ones. 

All my points above will hopefully make people see their performance reviews as something that is good for them, a way to grow and learn. In addition, another thing to consider is thinking beforehand about how are people feeling after the review. You want them to feel enthusiastic and engaged instead of drained and disengaged.

Download our guide to prepare for challenging conversations here. 

There is no one-size-fits-all to do this, but starting with the end in mind (what is it we want to achieve? How do we want people to feel?) is a good starting point. 

The Optimist View…

I think optimising performance reviews is possible, there is a better way, and there are many companies already trying to do better. For me, the fundamental part is to see a cultural shift in organisations where we put people at the centre and reinvent the wheel to create working environments that are inclusive of the real diversity of the world. 

This is a passion for me and one of the reasons I am passionate about my job at Optimist Performance. Our leadership programmes work with teams to develop their leadership skills to help them thrive in their organisations. Get in touch with us to learn more. 

The post 10 Ways to optimise performance reviews – By Charlotte Wathan appeared first on Optimist Performance.

Some of the most successful businesses are those that have built a happy and motivated team. However, building a successful team is not simple. It requires real commitment, careful planning and most importantly, it needs to start at the top.

Team Building is not just a buzzword

A fun team day away from the office (virtual or otherwise) once or twice a year is wonderful, but unfortunately, it is not enough to create the dream team.

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth.

In the same way a business has a growth or sales strategy, you need a long-term plan to build a team for success. You need to be clear and deliberate about your people strategy. 

What are the main challenges you are facing in order to achieve this? What would you like to address first? Every business will have a unique strategy; take the time to reflect on what the people in your team/organisation need and how you can help them become the dream team.

If you need help building a long-term plan for your team to thrive and succeed, get in touch with us. This is what we specialise in.  

Don’t tell people what to do; show them how to do it. The best leaders lead by example. Before trying to change the whole team or organisation, you must ensure that the executive team is on board and committed to the plan.

Company Culture and Values are just words…

In today’s world, having a solid company culture and values is essential, and it will also serve as the foundation to build your dream team. Customers and employees alike choose a brand based not only on the services or products they offer but also on how authentic and relevant the culture and values embodied by the brand are to their daily lives.

However, culture and values are just words unless they are translated into behaviours. If one of your company values is trustworthiness, what does this mean in everyone’s daily working life? A word can mean different things to different people; this is why it’s important to have clarity not only on what the culture and the values are but how you and the rest of your team live those values day in and day out. 

Aim for sustainable growth

The need to grow the team is a great sign. However, many businesses make the mistake of beginning the hiring process without first considering the people they need and want to succeed. Or how they can potentially signal a shift in the culture and values they’re looking to build and embed. 

Sure, depending on the role, asking for years of experience and a degree can be helpful, but we all are more than just our last job title and professional expertise. It may be better to hire someone who lacks experience but truly aligns with your company’s mission and is eager to learn and grow than to hire someone who has relevant experience but is simply looking at the paycheck.

It will be easier for you to find the ideal fit for your team if you are confident in the culture, values and people’s strategy that set your company apart.

You should also prioritise retention and engagement as you grow your team. While it could take you a little longer to induct and train someone with less expertise and experience, hiring a new employee every year will cost you more time and resources in the long run.

In addition, you need to consider how your team members will progress in the longer term as part of your people strategy. Lack of development and growth is one of the main reasons people quit their jobs. Enabling your best talent to access development opportunities will make them feel valued and motivated. Furthermore, it will allow you to start building your succession plan.

If you have a clear long-term plan for the development of your people, you can differentiate yourself from competitors, improve people’s sense of belonging and ensure that the people who stay are engaged and aligned with your culture and values. 

Plan well but don’t forget the execution

No matter where you start—whether you already have a one-year plan in place or you simply took your team outside for a day to talk about how to become a stronger team—execution is the most critical step.

No need to worry. You don’t have to jump in headfirst or attempt to address every problem at once. The important thing is that you start. People want to see that actions are taken, even if small and incremental. This will maintain their engagement and commitment to change. 

When thinking about execution, you must consider what you are committing to and how you will hold yourselves accountable. Whether it’s a new tool, technique or way of doing something, you need to plan for accountability. 

Share a doc where everyone commits to something, record a video, or sign an agreement; it doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as everyone is committed. 

The Optimist view…

Building your team for success is not an easy task. It takes time, you’re bound to make some mistakes, and you’ll need to adjust your plan along the way. However, to achieve the company’s growth and revenue targets, you will need the best from everyone in the team. 

Focusing on people and culture may not seem a priority if you are looking at revenue, but the only way you will get there is by building a successful team to support you on the journey.

At Optimist Performance, we help companies build their team for success. We’d be happy to work with you whether you want to start building and delivering your long-term plan or are just at a starting point for developing one. 

We will create a bespoke programme for you, either for a week, a month, six months or a year. We will focus on what you and your team need and work with you flexibly and collaboratively along the way to ensure your success. 

The post How to build your team for success – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.