3 Behaviors Leaders Need to Effectively Coach Through Change

You’ve all read about it, heard about it, and likely tried to implement it.

You intellectually understand the concept and perhaps have seen the benefits.  But very few leaders are emotionally ready to follow through on one of the most basic and challenging growth perpetuating behaviors - coaching through change. How do I know this?  By looking at the data of leaders at all levels who, despite understanding how activity and behavior change will lead to improved team sales results, either consciously or subconsciously continue doing the same things and obtain the same results.

For example, approximately 60% of frontline managers are so change averse they won’t execute basic coaching activities and do them with enough quality, even after acknowledging and understanding the benefits. And correspondingly, 60% of senior leaders who have committed to adoption, do very little to hold their frontline leaders accountable to coaching objectives. This is a growth-limiting, order-promoting coaching flaw that is pervasive in most companies.

What does coaching through change feel like?  It’s painful. It makes one question their decisions. It’s UNCOMFORTABLE! When executive leadership questions your decision, will you support it? When your team complains, will you stick with your decision? 

The poster child of coaching through change is my old boss, whom I wrote about in our book, The Coaching Effect.  Mitch was my national sales manager at a medical equipment company, and he had perfected what I believe to be a learnable skill: coaching through change. When a logical decision was made, he didn’t allow emotion, or much else, to alter the decision for a period of time, generally a year.

An example of Mitch’s resolve goes something like this: Simplistically, and at a high-level, there are only two ways to grow sales: increase the revenue per sales person or add more sales people (or do both).  In that spirit, for us to grow revenue, it made perfect sense to carve out a new territory within the western region, of which I was the manager, and add a ninth sales person to my team. The market was there, the geography was workable (or so I thought), and after doing the calculations Mitch and I made the call—I would make a new hire.

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